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Edmund Burke 
Orations and Essays 


The World’s Great Books 


Committee of Selection 


Thomas B. Reed William R. Harper 


Speaker of the House President of the | 
of Representatives University of Chicago 


Edward Everett Hale Ainsworth R. Spofford 


Author of The Man Of the Congressional 
Without a Country Library 


Rossiter Johnson 
Editor of Little Classics and Editor-in-Chief of this Series 


Aldine Edition 


A fad - 
| te 


ie, ee a 
pete le fi 


Copyright,1899 by D, Appleton & Co. 


EDMUND. BURKE. 


Photogravure from the painting by Joshua Reynolds in the 
National Gallery, London. 


Orations and Essays 


By 


Edmund Burke 


With a Critical and Biographical Introduction 
by Edwin Lawrence Godkin 


Illustrated 


New York 
D. Appleton and Company 


1900 


vey 


i 
At 


By D. APPLET 


DT ae Oe 


EDMUND BURKE 


MoNTESQUIEU and Burke were the two great political 
philosophers of the eighteenth century. The light had 
dawned on Locke, but he spent too much of his treatise 
on government in demonstrating that “ Adam had _ not, 
either by natural right of fatherhood or by positive dona- 
tion from God, any such authority over his children, or 
dominion over the world, as is pretended.” It may be 
said, however, that Locke was the first serious guide in 
modern politics. He was the first to preach that the 
origin of human society was to be found in the “ tacit 
consent” of those who formed it. But his influence was 
small, and the readers of his book on civil government 
were largely confined to the literary class. I think I 
may safely say that to Montesquieu and to Burke we owe 
what I may call the dawn of political consciousness. 
There is a sentence in Sainte-Beuve on Montesquieu 
which exactly describes the state of mind in which Burke, 
as well as Montesquieu, entered on the work of political 
speculation: “He felt more and more the greatness of 
the social invention, and desired more and more the ele- 
vation of the human race.” This is in reality the secret 
of Burke’s writings on politics, and especially of his wor-- 
ship of prescription. Human society was to him the 
most glorious product of human reason, and he could not 
bear to see the slightest amendment effected in it, except 
for overwhelming reason. 

lll 


ie EDMUND BURKE 


Burke, born in Dublin in 1729, began life in London at 
a period when Irishmen, though subject to the Crown, 
were apt, like Scotchmen, to be looked on in some sense as 
foreigners, but he had the tie of English race and, what 
was of more consequence, the tie of religion, when Prot- 
estantism was a sort of caste. He had hardly become 
known as a young literary man in the London coffee- 
houses when his extraordinary capacity was perceived. 
The most remorseless and prejudiced critic of that day, 
Dr. Johnson, was no sooner brought in contact with him 
than he felt that to meet Burke, even in a coffee-house 
discussion, called for “all his powers,” and that to fall in 
with him, even under a gateway during a shower, one 
must feel that he was a remarkable man. 

London was then a comparatively small place. The 
political circle was narrow, composed principally of a few 
rich families, who divided the government between them 
and the king. They had this peculiarity, however, which 
has been preserved by the Tories nearly to our day, of 
keeping a sharp lookout for talent among men of a lower 
social grade. Disraeli and Chamberlain were not the 
first to be picked up, and made to do the work of political 
drudgery by what was called their “betters.” But in 
those days such men had not to be rewarded with peer- 
ages, garters, or seats in the Cabinet. They were very 
well content to place their powers at the service of 
the state, under what Napier calls the “cold shade of 
aristocracy.” It was not long before Burke’s talents 
came to the notice of one of the great men of the day, 
afterward known as “Single-speech” Hamilton, and 
were turned remorselessly to account for his patron’s 
credit. From that time his rise was rapid, and he be- 
came, during the course of the American war and the 
troubles between the king and the Parliament, the great- 
est elucidator that ever has appeared in the field of gov- 
ernment. I say this because most of his political utter- 
ances, though containing novelties when he produced 


EDMUND BURKE Vv 


them, have had their greatness diminished solely by the 
fact that they have been so cherished and diffused as to 
have become the commonplaces of modern politics. 

Like Napoleon, Burke owed a great deal to circum. 
stances. The war with the American colonies and the 
rise of the Indian empire were occasions happily fitted to 
call forth his acumen. The modern world had just begun 
to come into existence. The old medizval world was 
just ready to perish amid the flames of the French Revo- 
lution. There was needed a philosopher who could 
gather and turn to account the lessons of these great con- 
vulsions. It is safe to say that without these events the 
“ Observations on a late Publication entitled the Present 
State of the Nation,” the “ Thoughts on the Present Dis- 
contents,” the ‘“ Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” 
the speech on “ Conciliation with America,” the “ Letters 
on a Regicide Peace,” and the “ Reflections on the Revo- 
lution in France” never would have been written; and 
had they never been written, the modern world would 
have lost one of its great sources of doctrine, of reproof, 
and of instruction in politics. A good deal of fault has 
been found with the gaudiness of Burke’s rhetoric, with 
the violence of his invective, and with the strength of his 
prejudices; but, making allowance for all this, making 
allowance for even total dissent from him on the French 
question, it is impossible to read any of the essays we 
have mentioned without being struck with the depth of 
his insight, with the breadth of his forecast, and with the 
extraordinary skill with which he had rolled words of 
wisdom into telling aphorisms which everybody could 
carry about with him without reference to the general 
argument. It is difficult to find a recent political essay, 
or newspaper article, in which there are not traces of 
indebtedness to him. A very large number of maxims 
and assertions with which he startled the Tories of 1780 
are to-day the inspiration of every stump orator or 
speaker at a town meeting. A young man who has mas- 


vi EDMUND BURKE 


tered the productions we have mentioned is really armed 
against all opponents of free government, as well as 
against all promoters of unbridled democracy. 

How it happened that a man of such remarkable pow- 
ers, who rose so high in the councils of the state, did not 
reach the highest honour, that of a seat in the Cabinet, has 
furnished much food for discussion among Burke’s biog- 
raphers, as well as among those who have commented 
upon the history of his times. There could hardly bea 
higher tribute to a man’s greatness than the fact that such 
an incident in his career should have been the topic of 
so much speculation. Among all the conflicting theories 
that have been advanced on the subject, the most prob- 
able one seems to be, that he did not belong to the gov- 
erning caste, which was then, as we have said, a small 
one, and kept all the places of honour and emolument 
to itself, while accepting very freely the services of those 
who were content to work for less. The theory that he 
had vulgar relations may have something in it, but its 
support is slender and puerile. Burke always suffered, 
as only in England a man can suffer, from impecuniosity. 
He had to use even his great powers for the defence of 
his pension, in an age when pensions were freely lavished 
on corrupt politicians and unscrupulous legislators. The 
“Letter to a Noble Lord” is fine, but it is melancholy 
to reflect, as one reads it, that such a man should have 
had to write an essay on such a topic. 

The flaws in Burke’s career are his’ course on the In- 
dian question and on the French Revolution. With re- 
gard to India, it had just become, in his time, the posses- 
sion of a band of English traders whom the fall of the 
Mogul Empire had converted into conquerors. They 
made no profession of any higher motives than mercan- 
tile greed, and the return of their enriched agents to 
England, as what were called “ Nabobs,” had a visibly 
unfortunate effect on the conflict that was going on be- 
tween the king and the friends of free government. 


EDMUND BURKE Vii | 


In fact, there was just misrule enough and corruption 
enough in the growth of the English empire to rouse 
-Burke’s hatred of oppression and of disorder, which was 
the strongest passion of his nature, to a boiling-point. 
He therefore threw himself into the prosecution of War- 
ren Hastings with a fervour and earnestness the continu- 
ance of which during a long trial deprived him finally of 
public interest and support. He is not the first man who 
has found that this interest and support can hardly be 
depended on for long contests. 

In the case of the French Revolution he was face to 
face with another order of considerations. He wrote a 
pamphlet on it which convulsed England, and in which, 
it has been justly said, he all but completely overlooked 
the wrongs of the wretched peasants which had had so. 
much to do with bringing it about. The only recent 
parallels that I can find for the effect of this pamphlet on 
English opinion are Mr. Gladstone’s pamphlet on the 
Government of Naples and his speeches on what were 
called “the Bulgarian Atrocities.” These are the only 
two writers who have been able to rouse Englishmen to 
a passionate interest in foreign events. There is little 
doubt that Burke’s “ Reflections on the Revolution in 
France” had much to do with precipitating the twenty- 
years’ war on which Pitt entered, and which so fatally 
retarded the progress of freedom and reform at home, 
besides covering the Continent with blood and flame. 

But the cause of his abhorrence of the French Revolu- 
tion was substantially the same as that of his abhorrence 
of the conquests of the East India Company. In both 
cases he was defending what was old, what was estab- 
lished, and what had once been great and powerful. In 
the prosecution of Warren Hastings he had been defend- 
ing princes and potentates whose origin was lost in the 
night of time, and whose ancestors had once been strong 
in war and wise in council. In attacking the French 
Revolution also, he defended an ancient monarchy, and a 


viii EDMUND BURKE 


church and nobility, which, whatever their faults, were 
almost coeval with Christianity itself. It was the defence 
of his idol, prescription, which drew from him the superb 
burst of rhetoric on Windsor Castle. 

We must not forget, however, in reading modern com- 
ments on these lapses and short-comings of a great man 
that we stand very far outside the age and the atmos- 
phere in which Burke raved and thundered. We have 
no idea whatever in our day of the effect produced on 
the men of Burke’s time by the predominance in English 
society of the “ Nabobs,” or we only get an idea of it 
from the more recent memory of the effect which the 
West-Indian planters produced a generation later on those 
who were agitating the emancipation of the negroes. We 
can easily imagine also the effect of the French Revo- 
lution on a world in England in which authority still 
‘reigned, in which the constitution in church and state 
was still an object of adoration, of the news that every- 
thing sacred and everything venerable in a neighbour- 
ing state had been suddenly destroyed at the hands of a 
howling mob. The probable effects of this on the pub- 
lic mind we can only compare to the effect of the Indian 
mutiny and the massacre of Cawnpore on a later gener- 
ation, or of the news of the firing on Fort Sumter on the 
Northern public in America. We who live in calmer 
times, with riper experience and with fuller knowledge, 
find it easy enough to point out the defects of Burke’s 
argumentation, and to prune his exuberance; but we 
must remember that every man, even the greatest, not 
only has the defects of his qualities, but partakes of the 
passions of his time. On all other topics it is difficult to 
say too much of Burke’s farsightedness and judicial- 
mindedness. He was born and brought up an Irishman 
and a Protestant, in the days when the unhappy Catholics 
of his country still lived under the Penal Laws, and the 
only duty the Protestant thought he owed them was 
hatred. Burke’s devotion to their cause never wavered. 


EDMUND BURKE | ix 


His perception of the impolicy as well as the iniquity of 
their wrongs never ceased to be acute. Though trans- 
ported to England in early life, and honoured and re- 
warded, as only few Englishmen are, he did not, as 
too many Irishmen have done, merge himself in the con- 
quering race, and, in sharing in their glory, forget his 
own unhappy country. 

The subjects of his earlier efforts before his appear- 
ance in the political arena—the “ Vindication of Natural 
Society,” directed against Lord Bolingbroke, and the 
“Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and 
Beautiful ’—are mainly interesting for their style. They 
belonged to the age of pamphlets on all sorts of subjects, 
in which men delighted before the age of monthly 
magazines and newspapers. But his essay on “The 
Present Discontents” showed that he was very far 
from being a mere rhetorician, even in his literary begin- 
nings. His capacity for dealing with dry details, and 
with the marshalling of statistics, was there fully revealed, 
and the Tories were made aware that there was no field 
in which both his pen and his tongue were not to be 
dreaded. “The Vindication of Natural Society” is an 
attempt to refute by irony Lord Bolingbroke’s views of 
religion, and is more of a jeu d’esprit than anything else 
he wrote; but the essay on the “Origin of our Ideas of 
the Sublime and Beautiful” is an analysis of the human 
faculties which create what we call art, and had the good 
fortune to secure the strong approbation of Lessing. 

In summing up all that is to be said about Burke’s 
career as a whole, it may be safely alleged that both his 
defects and his virtues are to be ascribed, in the last 
analysis, to his reverence for prescription in the sense of 
rights derived from immemorial usage. As I said in the 
beginning of this article, Burke’s respect for human 
society was very great. For a society which had been 
long established and successfully carried on it was over- 
whelming. It was the secret of his detestation of the 


xX EDMUND BURKE 


king’s attempt to subject the English colonies to arbitrary 
rule, as well as of. his horror over the overthrow of the 
French monarchy. Stare super antiquas vias was the 
motto of his political philosophy. Had he lived to see 
the difficulty-the French have had in reconstituting their 
society after the ancient traditions had been cast aside 
he would be more than ever confirmed in the belief that 
in politics whatever is is not exactly right, but has the 
strongest presumptions in its favour. 

Toward the end of his life he was seized with the Eng- 
lishman’s usual desire for a place in the country, and 
bought a small estate at Beaconsfield, in Buckingham- 
shire, where he amused himself in his last years with 
farming and gardening. But those closing years were 
sadly embittered by the early death of an only son, of 
whom he had great hopes, but whose abilities, according 
to the testimony of contemporaries, he greatly overrated. 
One of the somewhat ridiculous discussions in which his 
biographers have indulged—one of the usual penalties of | 
greatness—is how he procured the means of purchasing 
the Beaconsfield place. This, like the reason why he did 
not obtain a place in the Cabinet, must now remain for- 
ever one of the mysteries of his existence. He never re- 
covered from the death of his son, and died July 9, 1797. © 
His ‘Letter to a Noble Lord” contains a touching ac- 
count of the desolation in which it left him. One of the 
closing scenes in the old man’s life, described by a con- 
temporary, was his weeping in the paddock over the neck 
of his son’s favourite horse. 

EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN. 


Note.—The best edition of Burke’s works is that issued in Boston, 
Mass., which was perfected by the scholarship and editorial skill of Mr. 
George Nichols, who detected and corrected thousands of errors in the 
English editions. The contents of this volume are taken from that edi- 
tion, by the courtesy of the publishers, Messrs. Little, Brown & Co. 


FAMOUS AND UNIQUE MANUSCRIPT AND 
BOOK ILLUSTRATIONS. : 


A series of fac-similes, showing the development of manuscript and 
book illustrating during four thousand years. 


“SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE. 


Fac-simile oF a soloured wood-engraving from a French edition of the 
| traveller’s works, printed at Lyons, 1485 .a. p. 


Yh Gia 


CONTENTS 


SPEECHES 
On American Taxation 
To the Electors of Bristol 


Resolutions for Conciliation with the American Colonies 


On his Parliamentary Conduct. 
tion : : : 

Bristol—Declining the Poll . 

On Warren Hastings . 


ESSAYS 
On the Sublime and Beautiful 


Bristo!—previous to the Elec- 


Reflections on the Revolution in France 


A Letter to a noble Lord 


xi 


I4I 
667 
193 


351 
619 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


” FACING PAGE 


EDMUND BURKE . . ; ° . . . Frontispiece 


Photogravure from the painting by Joshua Reynolds in the 
National Gallery, London 


SIR JOHN MANDEVILLE 


Fac-simile of a coloured wood-engraving from a French edition 
of the traveller’s works, printed at Lyons, 1485 A. D. 


THE BOSTON TEA-PARTY 


Photogravure from a drawing made for this work 


OLD BRISTOL. 


Photogravure from a drawing after a print of the eighteenth 
century 


THE LAST DAY OF THE MONTAGNARDS ., ‘ 


Photogravure from a painting by Georges Cain 


CHARLOTTE CORDAY ., : : ; : ; 5, , 


Photogravure from a painting by Jules Aviat 
COVENT GARDEN . i P : : : ; 
Photogravure from a painting by B. Nebot 


Xili 


146 
422 
554 


658 


7 


ats ern habe etal? Shea 
i ad ‘ be fs iy Sea Portis ath, oe ta 2 iy 


th 


* 


[hey gi 


SP eeOUhS AND ESSAYS 


ON AMERICAN TAXATION 


On the toth of April, 1774, Mr. Rose Fuller, member of 
Parliament for Rye, made the following motion :— 


“ That an act made in the seventh year of the reign of his present Majesty 
intituled, ‘ An act for granting certain duties in the British colonies and planta- 
tions in America; for allowing a drawback of the duties of customs upon the 
exportation from this kingdom of coffee and cocoa-nuts, of the produce of the 
said colonies or plantations ; for discontinuing the drawbacks payable on china 
earthenware exported to America; and for more effectually preventing the 
clandestine running of goodsin the said colonies and plantations,’ might be 
read.” 


The act was read accordingly,and Mr. Fuller then moved,— 


“That this House will, upon this day sevennight, resolve itself into a com- 
mittee of the whole House, to take into consideration the duty of three-pence 
per pound weight upon tea, payable in all his Majesty’s dominions in America, 
imposed by the said act ; and also the appropriation of the said duty.” 

On this latter motion a warm and interesting debate arose, in which Mr. 
Burke spoke as follows : 


IR,—I agree with the honourable gentleman ! who spoke 
last, that this subject is not new in this House. Very 
disagreeably to this House, very unfortunately to this nation, 
and to the peace and prosperity of this whole empire, no 
topic has been more familiar to us. For nine long years, 
session after session, we have been lashed round and round 
this miserable circle of occasional arguments and temporary 
expedients. I am sure our heads must turn and our stom- 


achs nauseate with them. We have had them in every shape ; 
I I 


2 BURKE 


we have looked at them in every point of view. In- 
vention is exhausted ; reason is fatigued ; experience has 
given judgment ; but obstinacy is not yet conquered. 

The honourable gentleman has made one endeavour more 
to diversify the form of this disgusting argument. He has 
thrown out a speech composed almost entirely of challenges. 
Challenges are serious things; and ashe is a man of prudence 
as well as resolution, I dare say he has very well weighed 
those challenges before he delivered them. I had long the 
happiness to sit at the same side of the House, and to agree 
with the honourable gentleman on all the American questions. 
My sentiments, I am sure, are well known to him; and I 
thought I had been perfectly acquainted with his. Though 
I find myself mistaken, he will still permit me to use the 
privilege of an old friendship; he will permit me to apply 
myself to the House under the sanction of his authority, and 
on the various grounds he has measured out, to submit to 
you the poor opinions which I have formed upon a matter 
of importance enough to demand the fullest consideration I 
could bestow upon it. 

He has stated to the House two grounds of deliberation : 
one narrow and simple, and merely confined to the question 
on your paper; the other more large and more complicated, 
—comprehending the whole series of the Parliamentary 
proceedings with regard to America, their causes, and their 
consequences. With regard to the latter ground, he states it 
as useless, and thinks it may be even dangerous, to enter 
into so extensive a field of inquiry. Yet, to my surprise, he 
had hardly laid down this restrictive proposition, to which 
his authority would have given so much weight, when directly, 
and with the same authority, he condemns it, and declares 
it absolutely necessary to enter into the most ample histor- 
ical detail. His zeal has thrown hima little out of his usual 
accuracy. In this perplexity, what shall we do, Sir, who are 
willing to submit tothe lawhe gives us? He has reprobated 
in one part of his speech the rule he had laid down for de- 
bate in the other, and, after narrowing the ground for all those 


AMERICAN TAXATION 3 


who are to speak after him, he takes an excursion, himself, 
as unbounded as the subject and the extent of his great 
abilities. 

Sir, when I can not obey all his laws, I will do the best I 
can. Iwill endeavour to obey such of them as have the sanc- 
tion of his example, and to stick to that rule which, though 
not consistent with the other, is the most rational. He was 
certainly in the right, when he took the matter largely. I 
can not prevailon myself to agree with him in his censure of 
hisown conduct. It isnot, he will give me leave to say, either 
useless or dangerous. He asserts, that retrospect is not 
wise ; and the proper, the only proper, subject of inquiry, is 
“not how we got into this difficulty, but how we are to get out 
of it.” In other words, we are, according to him, to consult 
our invention, and to reject our experience. The mode of 
deliberation he recommends is diametrically opposite to 
every rule of reason and every principle of good sense estab- 
lished amongst mankind. For that sense and that reason I 
have always understood absolutely to prescribe, whenever we 
are involved in difficulties from the measures we have pur- 
sued, that we should take a strict review of those measures, 
in order to correct our errors, if they should be corrigible,— 
or at least to avoid adull uniformity in mischief, and the un- 
pitied calamity of being repeatedly caught in the same snare. 

Sir, I will freely follow the honourable gentleman in his 
historical discussion, without the least management for men 
or measures, further than as they shall seem to me to deserve 
it. But before I go into that large consideration, because I 
would omit nothing that can give the House satisfaction, I 
wish to tread the narrow ground to which alone the honour- 
able gentleman, in one part of his speech, has so strictly con- 
fined us. 

He desires to know, whether, if we were to repeal this tax, 
agreeably to the proposition of the honourable gentleman 
who made the motion, the Americans would not take post 
on this concession, in order to make a new attack on the next 
body of taxes; and whether they would not call for a repeal 


4 BURKE 


of the duty on wine as loudly as they do now for the repeal 
of the duty on tea. Sir, I can give no security on this sub- 
ject. But I will do all that I can, and all that can be fairly 
demanded. To the experience which the honourable gentle- 
man reprobates in one instant and reverts to in the next, to 
that experience, without the least wavering or hesitation on 
my part, I steadily appeal : and would to God there was no 
other arbiter to decide on the vote with which the House is 
to conclude this day ! 

When Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in the year 
1766, I affirm, first, that the Americans did not in conse- 
quence of this measure call upon you to give up the former 
Parliamentary revenue which subsisted in that country, or 
even any one of the articles which compose it. I affirm also, 
that, when, departing from the maxims of that repeal, you 
revived the scheme of taxation, and thereby filled the minds 
of the colonists with new jealousy and all sorts of apprehen- 
sions, then it was that they quarreled with the old taxes as 
well as the new; then it was, and not till then, that they 
questioned all the parts of your legislative power, and by the 
battery of such questions have shaken the solid structure of 
this empire to its deepest foundations. 

Of those two propositions I shall, before I have done, 
give such convincing, such damning proof, that, however the 
contrary may be whispered in circles or bawled in news- 
papers, they never more will dare to raise their voices in this 
House. I speak with great confidence. I have reason for 
it. The ministers are with me. They at least are convinced 
that the repeal of the Stamp Act had not, and that no repeal 
can have, the consequences which the honourable gentleman 
who defends their measures is so much alarmed at. To 
their conduct I refer him for a conclusive answer to his 
objection. I carry my proof irresistibly into the very body 
of both Ministry and Parliament: not on any general reason- 
ing growing out of collateral matter, but on the conduct of 
the honourable gentleman’s ministerial friends on the new 
revenue itself. 


AMERICAN TAXATION 5 


The act of 1767, which grants this tea-duty, sets forth in 
its preamble, that it was expedient to raise a revenue in 
America for the support of the civil government there, as well 
as for purposes still more extensive. To this support the act 
assigns six branches of duties. About two years after this 
act passed, the ministry, I mean the present ministry, thought 
it expedient to repeal five of the duties, and to leave (for 
reasons best known to themselves) only the sixth standing. 
Suppose any person, at the time of that repeal, had thus ad- 
dressed the minister: ? “‘ Condemning, as you do, the repeal 
of the Stamp Act, why do you venture to repeal the duties 
upon glass, paper, and painters’ colours? Let your pretense 
for the repeal be what it will, are you not thoroughly con- 
vinced that your concessions will produce, not satisfaction, 
but insolence in the Americans, and that the giving up these 
taxes will necessitate the giving up of all the rest?” This 
objection was as palpable then as it is now; and it was as 
good for preserving the five duties as for retaining the sixth. 
Besides, the minister will recollect that the repeal of the 
Stamp Act had but just preceded his repeal; and the ill 
policy of that measure, (had it been so impolitic as it has 
been represented,) and the mischiefs it produced, were quite 
recent. Upon the principles, therefore, of the honourable 
gentleman, upon the principles of the minister himself, the 
minister has nothing at all to answer. He stands con- 
demned by himself, and by all his associates old and new, as 
a destroyer, in the first trust of finance, of the revenues,— 
and in the first rank of honour, as a betrayer of the dignity 
of his country. 

Most men, especially great men, do not always know 
their well-wishers. I come to rescue that noble lord out of 
the hands of those he calls his friends and even out of his 
own. I will do him the justice he is denied at home. He 
has not been this wicked or imprudent man. He knew 
that a repeal had no tendency to produce the mischiefs 
which give so much alarm to hishonourable friend. His 
work was not bad in its principle, but imperfect in its 


6 BURKE 


execution; and the motion on your paper presses him only 
to complete a proper plan, which, by some unfortunate and 
unaccountable error, he had left unfinished. 

I hope, Sir, the honourable gentleman who spoke last is 
thoroughly satisfied, and satisfied out of the proceedings of 
ministry on their own favourite act, that his fears from a repeal 
are groundless. If he is not, I leave him, and the noble lord 
who sits by him, to settle the matter as well as they can to- 
gether ; for, if the repeal of American taxes destroys all our 
government in America,—he is the man!—and he is the 
worst of all the repealers, because he is the last. 

But I hear it rung continually in my ears, now and for- 
merly,—“ The preamble! what will become of the pre- 
amble, if you repeal this tax ?””—I am sorry to be compelled 
so often to expose the calamities and disgraces of Parlia- 
ment. The preamble of this law, standing as it now stands, 
has the lie direct given to it by the provisionary part of the 
act: if that can be called provisionary which makes no pro- 
vision. I should be afraid to express myself in this manner, 
especially in the face of such a formidable array of ability as 
is now drawn up before me, composed of the ancient house- 
hold troops of that side of the House and the new recruits 
from this, if the matter were not clear and indisputable. 
Nothing but truth could give me this firmness; but plain 
truth and clear evidence can be beat down by no ability. 
The clerk will be so good as to turn to the act, and to read 
this favourite preamble. 

“Whereas it is expedient that a revenue should be raised 
in your Majesty’s dominions in America, for making a more 
certain and adequate provision for defraying the charge of 
the administration of justice and support of civil government 
in such provinces where it shall be found necessary, and 
towards further defraying the expenses of defending, pro- 
tecting, and securing the said dominions.” 

You have heard this pompous performance. Now where 
is the revenue which is to do all these mighty things? Five 
sixths repealed,—abandoned,—sunk,—gone,—lost forever. 


AMERICAN TAXATION 7 


Does the poor solitary tea-duty support the purposes of this 
preamble? Is not the supply there stated as effectually 
abandoned as if the tea-duty had perished in the general 
wreck? Here, Mr. Speaker, is a precious mockery :—a pre- 
amble without an act,—taxes granted in order to be re- 
pealed,—and the reasons of the grant still carefully kept up! 
This is raising a revenue in America! This is preserving 
dignity in England! If you repeal this tax, in compliance 
with the motion, I readily admit that you lose this fair pre- 
amble. Estimate your lossin it. The object of the act is 
gone already ; and all you suffer is the purging the statute- 
book of the opprobrium of an empty, absurd, and false 
recital. 

It has been said again and again, that the five taxes were 
repealed on commercial principles. It is so said in the paper 
in my hand: a paper which I constantly carry about; 
which I have often used, and shall often use again. What 
is got by this paltry pretense of commercial principles I 
know not; for, if your government in America is destroyed 
by the repeal of taxes, it is of no consequence upon what 
ideas the repeal is grounded. Repeal this tax, too, upon 
commercial principles, if you please. These principles will 
serve as well now as they did formerly. But you know 
that either your objection to a repeal from these supposed 
consequences has no validity, or that this pretense never 
could remove it. This commercial motive never was be- 
lieved by any man, either in America, which this letter is 
meant to soothe, or in England, which it is meant to deceive, 
It was impossible it should: because every man, in the least 
acquainted with the detail of commerce, must know that 
several of the articles on which the tax was repealed were 
fitter objects of duties than almost any other articles that 
could possibly be chosen,—without comparison more so 
than the tea that was left taxed, as infinitely less liable to 
be eluded by:contraband. The tax upon red and white lead 
was of this nature. You have in this kingdom an advantage 
in lead that amounts toamonopoly. When you find your- 


8 BURKE 


self in this situation of advantage, you sometimes venture 
to tax even your own export. You did so soon after the 
last war, when, upon this principle, you ventured to impose 
a duty on coals. In all the articles of American contraband 
trade, who ever heard of the smuggling of red lead and white 
lead? You might, therefore, well enough, without danger 
of contraband, and without injury to commerce, (if this 
were the whole consideration,) have taxed these commodi- 
ties. The same may be said of glass. Besides, some of the 
things taxed were so trivial, that the loss of the objects 
themselves, and their utter annihilation out of American com- 
merce, would have been comparatively as nothing. But is 
the article of tea such an object in the trade of England, as 
not to be felt, or felt but slightly, like white lead, and red 
lead, and painters’ colours? Tea is an object of far other 
importance. Tea is perhaps the most important object, 
taking it with its necessary connections, of any in the 
mighty circle of our commerce. If commercial principles 
had been the true motives to the repeal, or had they been 
at all attended to, tea would have been the last article we 
should have left taxed for a subject of controversy. 

Sir, it is not a pleasant consideration, but nothing in the 
world can read so awful and so instructive a lesson as the 
conduct of ministry in this business, upon the mischief of 
not having large and liberal ideas in the management of 
great affairs. Never have the servants of the state looked 
at the whole of your complicated interests in one connected 
view. They have taken things by bits and scraps, some at 
one time and one pretense, and some at another, just as 
they pressed, without any sort of regard to their relations or 
dependencies. They never had any kind of system, right 
or wrong; but only invented occasionally some miserable 
tale for the day, in order meanly to sneak out of difficulties 
into which they had proudly strutted. And they were put 
to all these shifts and devices, full of meanness and full of 
mischief, in order to pilfer piecemeal a repeal of an act which 
they had not the generous courage, when they found and 


AMERICAN TAXATION 9 


felt their error, honourably and fairly to disclaim. By such 
management, by the irresistible operation of feeble councils, 
so paltry a sum as three-pence in the eyes of a financier, so 
insignificant an article as tea in the eyes of a philosopher, 
have shaken the pillars of a commercial empire that circled 
the whole globe. 

Do you forget that in the very last year you stood on the 
precipice of general bankruptcy? Your danger was indeed 
great. You were distressed in the affairs of the East India 
Company; and you well know what sort of things are in- 
volved in the comprehensive energy of that significant ap- 
pellation. I am not called upon to enlarge to you on that 
danger, which you thought proper yourselves to aggravate, 
and to display to the world with all the parade of indiscreet 
declamation. The monopoly of the most lucrative trades 
and the possession of imperial revenues had brought you to 
the verge of beggary and ruin. Such was your represen- 
tation; such, in some measure, was your case. The vent of 
ten millions of pounds of this commodity, now locked up by 
the operation of an injudicious tax, and rotting in the ware- 
houses of the Company, would have prevented all this dis- 
tress, and all that series of desperate measures which you 
thought yourselves obliged to take in consequence of it. 
America would have furnished that vent, which no other 
part of the world can furnish but America, where tea is next 
to a necessary of life, and where the demand grows upon 
the supply. I hope our dear-bought East India Committees 
have done us at least so much good, asto let us know, that, 
without a more extensive sale of that article, our East India 
revenues and acquisitions can have no certain connection 
with this country. It is through the American trade of tea 
that your East India conquests are to be prevented from 
crushing you with their burden. They are ponderous 
indeed; and they must have that great country to lean 
upon, or they tumble upon your head. It is the same folly 
that has lost you at once the benefit of the West and of 
the East. This folly has thrown open folding-doors to 


10 BURKE 


contraband, and will be the means of giving the profits of 
the trade of your colonies to every nation but yourselves. 
Never did a people suffer so much for the empty words ofa 
preamble. It must be given up. For on what principle 
does it stand? This famous revenue stands, at this hour, 
on all the debate, as a description of revenue not as yet 
known in all the comprehensive (but too comprehensive! ) 
vocabulary of finance,—a preambulary tax. It is, indeed, a 
tax of sophistry, a tax of pedantry, a tax of disputation, a 
tax of war and rebellion, a tax for anything but benefit to 
the imposers or satisfaction to the subject. 

Well! but whatever it is, gentlemen will force the colonists 
to take the teas. You willforce them? Has seven years’ 
struggle been yet able to force them? Oh, but it seems 
“we are in the right. The tax is trifling,—in effect it is 
rather an exoneration than an imposition; three fourths of 
the duty formerly payable on teas exported to America is 
taken off,—the place of collection is only shifted; instead 
of the retention of a shilling from the drawback here, it is 
three-pence custom paid in America.” All this, Sir, is very 
true. But this is the very folly and mischief of the act. 
Incredible as it may seem, you know that you have de- 
liberately thrown away a large duty, which you held secure 
and quiet in your hands, for the vain hope of getting one 
three fourths less, through every hazard, through certain 
litigation, and possibly through war. 

The manner of proceeding in the duties on paper and 
glass, imposed by the same act, was exactly in the same 
spirit. There are heavy excises on those articles, when 
used in England. On export, these excises are drawn 
back. But instead of withholding the drawback, which might 
have been done, with ease, without charge, without possi- 
bility of smuggling, and instead of applying the money 
(money already in your hands) according to your pleasure, 
you began your operations in finance by flinging away your 
revenue; you allowed the whole drawback on export, and 
then you charged the duty, (which you had before discharged,) 


AMERICAN TAXATION at 


payable in the colonies, where it was certain the collection 
would devour it to the bone,—if any revenue were ever suf- 
fered to be collected at all. One spirit pervades and ani- 
mates the whole mass. 

Could anything bea subject of more just alarm to America 
than to see you go out of the plain highroad of finance, and 
give up your most certain revenues and your clearest in- 
terest, merely for the sake of insulting your colonies? No 
man ever doubted that the commodity of tea could bear an 
imposition of three-pence. But no commodity will bear 
three-pence, or will bear a penny, when the general feelings 
of men are irritated, and two millions of people are resolved 
not to pay. The feelings of the colonies were formerly the 
feelings of Great Britain. Theirs were formerly the feelings 
of Mr. Hampden, when called upon for the payment of 
twenty shillings. Would twenty shillings have ruined Mr. 
Hampden’s fortune? No! but the payment of half twenty 
shillings, on the principle it was demanded, would have 
made him a slave. It is the weight of that preamble, of 
which you are so fond, and not the weight of the duty, that 
the Americans are unable and unwilling to bear. 

It is, then, Sir, upon the principle of this measure, and 
nothing else, that we are at issue. It is a principle of politi- 
cal expediency. Your act of 1767 asserts that it is expedient 
to raise a revenue in America; your act of 1769, which takes 
away that revenue, contradicts the act of 1767, and, by some- 
thing much stronger than words, asserts that it is not expe- 
dient. It isa reflection upon your wisdom to persist in a solemn 
Parliamentary declaration of the expediency of any object, for 
which, at the same time, you make no sort of provision. 
And pray, sir, let not this circumstance escape you,—it is 
very material,—that the preamble of this act which we wish 
to repeal is not declaratory of a right, as some gentlemen 
seem to argue it: itis only a recital of the expediency of a 
certain exercise of a right supposed already to have been 
asserted ; an exercise you are now contending for by ways 
and means which you confess, though they were obeyed, to 


12 BURKE 


be utterly insufficient for their purpose. You are therefore 
at this moment in the awkward situation of fighting for a 
phantom,—a quiddity,—a thing that wants, not only a sub- 
stance, but even a name,—for a thing which is neither ab- 
stract right nor profitable enjoyment. 

They tell you, Sir, that your dignity is tied toit. I know 
not how it happens, but this dignity of yours is a terrible 
incumbrance to you; for it has of late been ever at war with 
your interest, your equity, and every idea of your policy. 
Show the thing you contend for to be reason, show it to be 
common sense, show it to be the means of attaining some 
useful end, and then I am content to allow it what dignity 
you please. But what dignity is derived from the persever- 
ance in absurdity is more than ever I could discern. The 
honourable gentleman has said well,—indeed, in most of his 
general observations I agree with him,—he says, that this 
subject does not stand as it did formerly. Oh, certainly 
not! Every hour you continue on this ill-chosen ground, 
your difficulties thicken on you ; and therefore my conclusion 
is, remove from a bad position as quickly as you can. The 
disgrace, and the necessity of yielding, both of them, grow 
upon you every hour of your delay. 

But will you repeal the act, says the honourable gentle- 
man, at this instant, when America is in open resistance 
to your authority, and that you have just revived your sys- 
tem of taxation? He thinks he has driven us into a 
corner. But thus pent up, Iam content to meet him; be- 
cause I enter the lists supported by my old authority, his 
new friends, the ministers themselves. The honourable gen- 
tleman remembers that about five years ago as great disturb- 
ances as the present prevailed in America on account of 
the new taxes. The ministers represented these disturbances 
as treasonable; and this House thought proper, on that 
representation, to make a famous address for a revival and 
for a new application of a statute of Henry the Eighth. We 
besought the king, in that well-considered address, to inquire 
into treasons, and to bring the supposed traitors from Amer- 


AMERICAN TAXATION 13 


ica to Great Britain for trial. His Majesty was pleased gra- 
ciously to promise a compliance with our request. All the 
attempts from this side of the House to resist these vio- 
lences, and to bring about a repeal, were treated with the ut- 
most scorn. An apprehension of the very consequences now ~ 
stated by the honourable gentleman was then given as a rea- 
son for shutting the door against all hope of such an alter- 
ation. And so strong was the spirit for supporting the new 
taxes, that the session concluded with the following remark- 
able declaration. After stating the vigorous measures which 
had been pursued, the speech from the throne proceeds :— 

“You have assured me of your firm support in the prose- 
cution of them. Nothing, in my opinion, could be more 
likely to enable the well-disposed among my subjects in that 
part of the world effectually to discourage and defeat the 
designs of the factious and seditious than the hearty con- 
currence of every branch of the legislature in the resolution 
of maintaining the execution of the laws in every part of my 
dominions.” 

After this no man dreamt that a repeal under this ministry 
could possibly take place. The honourable gentleman knows 
as well as I, that the idea was utterly exploded by those who 
sway the House. This speech was made on the ninth day 
of May, 1769. Five days after this speech, that is, on the 
thirteenth of the same month, the public circular letter, a 
part of which I am going to read to you, was written by Lord 
Hillsborough, Secretary of State forthe Colonies. After re- 
citing the substance of the king’s speech, he goes on thus :— 

“TI can take upon me to assure you, notwithstanding insinua- 
tions to the contrary from men with factious and seditious 
views, that his Majesty’s present administration have at no 
time entertained a design to propose to Parliament to lay any 
further taxes upon America, for the purpose of raising a re- 
venue; and that it is at present their intention to propose, the 
next session of Parliament, to take off the duties upon glass, 
paper, and colours, upon consideration of such duties having 
been laid contrary to the true principles of commerce. 


14 BURKE 


‘These have always been, and still are, the sentiments of 
his Majesty’s present servants, and by which their conduct 
in respect to America has been governed. And his Majesty 
relies upon your prudence and fidelity for such an explana- 
tion of his measures as may tend to remove the prejudices 
which have been excited by the misrepresentations of those 
who are enemies to the peace and prosperity of Great 
Britain and her colonies, and to reéstablish that mutual con- 
fidence and affection upon which the glory and safety of the 
British empire depend.” 

Here, Sir, is a canonical book of ministerial scripture : 
the general epistle to the Americans. What does the gen- 
tleman say to it? Here a repeal is promised,—promised 
without condition,—and while your authority was actually 
resisted. I pass by the public promise of a peer relative to 
the repeal of taxes by this House. I pass by the use of the 
king’s name in a matter of supply, that sacred and reserved 
right of the Commons. I conceal the ridiculous figure of 
Parliament hurling its thunders at the gigantic rebellion of 
America, and then, five days after, prostrate at the feet of 
those assemblies we affected to despise,—begging them, by 
the intervention of our ministerial sureties, to receive our 
submission, and heartily promising amendment. These 
might have been serious matters formerly; but we are 
grown wiser than our fathers. Passing, therefore, from the 
Constitutional consideration to the mere policy, does not 
this letter imply that the idea of taxing America for the pur- 
pose of revenue is an abominable project, when the ministry 
suppose none but factious men, and with seditious views, 
could charge them with it ? does not this letter adopt and sanc- 
tify the American distinction of taxing for a revenue? does 
it not formally reject all future taxation on that principle ? 
does it not state the ministerial rejection of such principle of 
taxation, not as the occasional, but the constant opinion of 
the king’s servants? does it not say, (I care not how con- 
sistently,) but does it not say, that their conduct with regard 
to America has been always governed by this policy? It 


AMERICAN TAXATION 15 


goes a great deal further. These excellent and trusty serv- 
ants of the king, justly fearful lest they themselves should 
have lost all credit with the world, bring out the image of 
their gracious sovereign from the inmost and most sacred 
shrine, and they pawn him as a security for their promises : 
“ His Majesty relies on your prudence and fidelity for such an 
explanation of his measures.” These sentiments of the min- 
ister and these measures of his Majesty can only relate to the 
principle and practise of taxing fora revenue; and accord- 
ingly Lord Botetourt, stating it as such, did, with great pro- 
priety, and in the exact spirit of his instructions, endeavour to 
remove the fears of the Virginian assembly lest the senti- 
ments which it seems (unknown to the world) had always 
been those of the ministers, and by which their conduct in 
respect to America had been governed, should by some pos- 
sible revolution, favourable to wicked American taxers, be 
hereafter counteracted. He addresses them in this manner :-— 

“It may possibly be objected, that, as his Majesty’s pres- 
ent administration are not immortal, their successors may be 
inclined to attempt to undo what the present ministers shall 
have attempted to perform; and tothat objection I can give 
but this answer: that it is my firm opinion, that the plan I 
have stated to you will certainly take place, and that it will 
never be departed from; and so determined am I forever to 
abide by it, that I will be content to be declared infamous, if 
I do not, to the last hour of my life, at all times, in all places, 
and upon all occasions, exert every power with which I either 
am or ever shall be legally invested, in order to obtain and 
maintain for the continent of America that satisfaction which 
I have been authorized to promise this day by the confiden- 
tial servants of our gracious sovereign, who to my certain 
knowledge rates his honour so high that he would rather 
part with his crown than preserve it by deceit.” 4 

A glorious and true character! which (since we suffer his 
ministers with impunity to answer for his ideas of taxation ) 
we ought to make it our business to enable his Majesty to 
preserve in allitsluster. Let him have character, since ours 


16 BURKE 


is no more! Let some part of government be kept in 
respect ! 3 

This epistle was not the letter of Lord Hillsborough 
solely, though he held the official pen. It was the letter of 
the noble lord upon the floor,’ and of all the king’s then min- 
isters, who ( with, I think, the exception of two only ) are 
his ministers at this hour. Thevery first news that a British 
Parliament heard of what it was to do with the duties which 
it had given and granted to the king was by the publication 
of the votes of American assemblies. It was in America 
that your resolutions were pre-declared. It was from thence 
that we knew to a certainty how much exactly, and nota 
scruple more nor less, we were to repeal. We were unwor- 
thy to be let into the secret of our own conduct. The 
assemblies had confidential communications from his Maj- 
esty’s confidential servants. We were nothing but instru- 
ments. Do you, after this, wonder that you have no weight 
and no respect in the colonies? After this are you surprised 
that Parliament is every day and everywhere losing (I feel it 
with sorrow, I utter it with reluctance) that reverential af- 
fection which so endearing a name of authority ought ever 
to carry with it? that you are obeyed solely from respect to 
the bayonet? and that this House, the ground and pillar 
of freedom, is itself held up only by the treacherous under- 
pinning and clumsy buttresses of arbitrary power ? 

If this dignity, which isto stand in the place of just policy 
and common sense, had been consulted, there was a time for 
preserving it, and for reconciling it with any concession. If 
in the session of 1768, that session of idle terror and empty 
menaces, you had, as you were often pressed to do, repealed 
these taxes, then your strong operations would have come 
justified and enforced, in case your concessions had been re- 
turned by outrages. But, preposterously, you began with 
violence ; and before terrors could have any effect, either good 
or bad, your ministers immediately begged pardon, and 
promised that repeal to the obstinate Americans which they 
had refused in an easy, good-natured, complying British Par- 


AMERICAN TAXATION 17 


liament. The assemblies, which had been publicly and 
avowedly dissolved for their contumacy, are called together 
to receive your submission. Your ministerial directors 
blustered like tragic tyrants here; and then went mumping 
with a sore leg in America, canting, and whining, and com- 
plaining of faction, which represented them as friends to a 
revenue from the colonies. I hope nobody in this House 
will hereafter have the impudence to defend American taxes 
inthe name of ministry. The moment they do, with this 
letter of attorney in my hand, I will tell them, in the au- 
thorized terms, they are wretches “with factious and se- 
ditious views,” “ enemies to the peace and prosperity of the 
mother country and the colonies,’ and subverters ‘‘ of the 
mutual affection and confidence on which the glory and 
safety of the British empire depend.” 

After this letter, the question is no more on propriety or 
dignity. They are gone already. The faith of your sov- 
ereign is pledged for the political principle. The general 
declaration in the letter goes to the whole of it. You must 
‘therefore either abandon the scheme of taxing, or you must 
send the ministers tarred and feathered to America, who 
dared to hold out the royal faith for a renunciation of all 
taxes forrevenue. Them you must punish, or this faith you 
must preserve. The preservation of this faith is of more 
consequence than the duties on red lead, or white lead, or 
on broken glass, or atlas-ordinary, or demy-fine, or blue-royal, 
or bastard, or foolscap, which you have given up, or the 
three-pence on tea which you retained. The letter went 
stamped with the public authority of this kingdom. The 
instructions for the colony government go under no other 
sanction; and America can not believe, and will not obey 
you, if you do not preserve this channel of communication 
sacred. You are now punishing the colonies for acting on 
distinctions held out by that very ministry which is here 
shining in riches,in favourand in powerand urging the pun- 
ishment of the very offense to which they had themselves been 


the tempters. 
2 


18 BURKE 


Sir, if reasons respecting simply your own commerce, 
which is your own convenience, were the sole grounds of the 
repeal of the five duties, why does Lord Hillsborough, in 
disclaiming in the name of the king and ministry their ever 
having had an intent to tax for revenue, mention it as the 
means “ of reéstablishing the confidence and affection of the 
colonies?’’ Is it a way of soothing others, to assure them 
that you will take good care of yourself? The medium, the 
only medium, for regaining their affection and confidence is 
that you willtake off something oppressive to their minds. 
Sir, the letter strongly enforces that idea: for though the re- 
peal of the taxes is promised on commercial principles, yet 
the means of counteracting the “ insinuations of men with fac- 
tious and seditious views” is by a disclaimer of the intention 
of taxing for revenue, as a constant, invariable sentiment 
and rule of conduct in the government of America. 

I remember that the noble lord on the floor, not in a for- 
mer debate to be sure, (it would be disorderly to refer to it, I 
suppose I read it somewhere,) but the noble lord was pleased 
to say, that he did not conceive how it could enter into the 
head of man to impose such taxes as those of 1767: I mean 
those taxes which he voted for imposing, and voted for re- 
pealing,—as being taxes, contrary to all the principles of 
commerce, laid on British manufactures. 

I dare say the noble lord is perfectly well read, because 
the duty of his particular office requires he should be so, in 
all our revenue laws, and in the policy which is to be col- 
lected out of them. Now, Sir, when he had read this act 
of American revenue, and a little recovered from his aston- 
ishment, I suppose he made one step retrograde (it is but 
one) and looked at the act which stands just before in 
the statute-book. The American revenue act is the forty- 
fifth chapter; the one to which I refer is the forty-fourth of 
the same session. These two acts are both to the same 
purpose: both revenue acts; both taxing out of the king- 
dom; and both taxing British manufactures exported. As 
the forty-fifth is an act for raising a revenue in America, the 


AMERICAN TAXATION 19 


forty-fourth is an act for raising a revenue in the Isle of 
Man. The two acts perfectly agree in all respects, except 
one. In the act for taxing the Isle of Man the noble lord 
will find, not, asin the American act, four or five articles, 
but almost the whole body of British manufactures, taxed 
from two and ahalf to fifteen per cent, and some articles, 
such as that of spirits, a great deal higher. You did not 
think it uncommercial to tax the whole mass of your manu- 
factures, and, let me add, your agriculture too; for, I now 
recollect, British corn is there also taxed up to ten per cent, 
and this too in the very headquarters, the very citadel of 
smuggling, the Isle of Man. Now will the noble lord con- 
descend to tell me why he repealed the taxes on your manu- 
factures sent out to America, and not the taxes on the 
manufactures exported to the Isle of Man? The principle 
was exactly the same, the objects charged infinitely more 
extensive, the duties without comparison higher. Why? 
Why, notwithstanding all his childish pretexts, because the 
taxes were quietly submitted to in the Isle of Man, and 
because they raised a flame in America. Your reasons were 
political, not commercial. The repeal was made, as Lord 
Hillsborough’s letter well expresses it, to regain “ the con- 
fidence and affection of the colonies, on which the glory and 
safety of the British empire depend.” A wise and just 
motive, surely, if ever there was such. But the mischief and 
dishonour, is that you have not done what you had given the 
colonies just cause to expect, when your ministers disclaimed 
the idea of taxes for a revenue. There is nothing simple, 
nothing manly, nothing ingenuous, open, decisive, or steady, 
in the proceeding, with regard either to the continuance or 
the repeal of the taxes. The whole has an air of littleness 
and fraud. The article of tea is slurred over in the circular 
letter, as it were by accident : nothing is said of a resolution 
either to keep that tax or to give it up. There is no fair 
dealing in any part of the transaction. 

If you mean to follow your true motive and your public 
faith, give up your tax on tea for raising a revenue, the 


20 BURKE 


principle of which has, in effect, been disclaimed in your 
name, and which produces you no advantage,—no, not a 
penny. Or, if you choose to go on with a poor pretense 
instead of a solid reason, and will still adhere to your cant 
of commerce, you have ten thousand times more strong 
commercial reasons for giving up this duty on tea than for 
abandoning the five others that you have already renounced. 

The American consumption of teas is annually, I believe, 
worth 300,000/. at the least farthing. If you urge the 
American violence as a justification of your perseverance in 
enforcing this tax, you know that you can never answer this 
plain question,—Why did you repeal the others given in 
the same act, whilst the very same violence subsisted r— 
But you did not find the violence cease upon that conces- 
sion—No! because the concession was far short of satisfying 
the principle which Lord Hillsborough had abjured, or even 
the pretense on which the repeal of the other taxes was 
announced ; and because, by enabling the East India Com- 
pany to open a shop for defeating the American resolution 
not to pay that specific tax, you manifestly showed a han- 
kering after the principle of the act which you formerly had 
renounced. Whatever road you take leads to a compliance 
with this motion. It opens to you at the end of every vista. 
Your commerce, your policy, your promises, your reasons, 
your pretenses, your consistency, your inconsistency,—all 
jointly oblige you to this repeal. 

But still it sticks in our throats, if we go so far, the 
Americans will go farther—We do not know that. We 
ought, from experience, rather to presume the contrary. Do 
we not know for certain, that the Americans are going on as 
fast as possible, whilst we refuse to gratify them? Can they 
do more, or can they do worse, if we yield this point? I 
think this concession will rather fix a turnpike to prevent 
their further progress. It is impossible to answer for 
bodies of men. But I am sure the natural effect of fidelity, 
clemency, kindness in governors is peace, good-will, order, 
and esteem, on the part of the governed. I would certainly, 


AMERICAN TAXATION 21 


at least, give these fair principles a fair trial; which, since 
the making of this act to this hour, they never have had. 

Sir, the honourable gentleman having spoken what he 
thought necessary upon the narrow part of the subject, I 
have given him, I hope, a satisfactory answer. He next 
presses me, by a variety of direct challenges and oblique 
reflections, to say something on the historical part. I shall 
therefore, Sir, open myself fully on that important and 
delicate subject: not for the sake of telling you a long story, 
(which, I know, Mr. Speaker, you are not particularly fond 
of,) but for the sake of the weighty instruction that, I flatter 
myself, will necessarily result from it. It shall not be 
longer, if I can help it, than so serious a matter requires. 

Permit me then, Sir, to lead your attention very far back, 
—back to the Act of Navigation, the cornerstone of the 
policy of this country with regard to its colonies. Sir, that 
policy was, from the beginning, purely commercial ; and the 
commercial system was wholly restrictive. It was the system 
ofamonopoly. No trade was let loose from that constraint, 
but merely to enable the colonists to dispose of what, in the 
course of your trade, you could not take,—or to enable 
them to dispose of such articles as we forced upon them, 
and for which, without some degree of liberty, they could 
not pay. Henceall your specific and detailed enumerations ; 
hence the innumerable checks and counterchecks ; hence that 
infinite variety of paper chains by which you bind together 
this complicated system of the colonies. This principle of 
commercial monopoly runs through no less than twenty-nine 
acts of Parliament, from the year 1660 to the unfortunate 
period of 1764. 

In all those acts the system of commerce is established as 
that from whence alone you proposed to make the colonies 
contribute (I mean directly and by the operation of your 
superintending legislative power) to the strength of the 
empire. I venture to say, that, during that whole period, 
a Parliamentary revenue from thence was never once in con- 
templation. Accordingly, in all the number of laws passed 


22 BURKE 


with regard to the plantations, the words which distinguish 
revenue laws specifically as such were, I think, premeditately 
avoided, I do not say, Sir, that a form of words alters the 
nature of the law, or abridges the power of the lawgiver. 
It certainly does not. However, titles and formal pream- 
bles are not always idle words; and the lawyers frequently 
argue from them. I state these facts to show, not what was 
your right, but what has been your settled policy. Our 
revenue laws have usually a title, purporting their being 
grants; and the words “ give and grant” usually precede 
the enacting parts. Although duties were imposed on 
America in acts of King Charles the Second, and in acts of 
King William, no one title of giving “an aid to his Majesty,” 
or any other of the usual titles to revenue acts, was to be 
found in any of them till 1764; nor were the words “give 
and grant”? in any preamble until the sixth of George the 
Second. However, the title of this act of George the Second, 
notwithstanding the words of donation, considers it merely 
as a regulation of trade: ‘‘ An act for the better securing 
of the trade of his Majesty’s sugar colonies in America.” 
This act was made on a compromise of all, and at the ex- 
press desire of a part, of the colonies themselves. It was 
therefore in some measure with their consent ; and having a 
title directly purporting only a commercial regulation, and 
being in truth nothing more, the words were passed by, ata 
time when no jealousy was entertained, and things were 
little scrutinized. Even Governor Bernard, in his second 
printed letter, dated in 1763, gives it as his opinion, that 
“it was an act of prohibition, not of revenue.” This is 
certainly true, that no act avowedly for the purpose of 
revenue, and with the ordinary title and recital taken to- 
gether, is found in the statute-book until the year I have 
mentioned: that is, the year 1764. All before this period 
stood on commercial regulation and restraint. The scheme 
of a colony revenue by British authority appeared, therefore, 
to the Americans in the light of a great innovation. The 
words of Governor Bernard’s ninth letter, written in No- 


AMERICAN TAXATION 23 


vember, 1765, state this idea very strongly. ‘“ It must,” says 
he, ‘‘have been supposed such an innovation as a Parlia- 
mentary taxation would cause a great alarm, and meet with 
much opposition in most parts of America; it was quitenew 
to the people, and had no visible bounds set to it.” After 
stating the weakness of government there, he says, “ Was 
this a time to introduce so great a novelty as a Parliamentary 
inland taxation in America?” Whatever the right might 
have been, this mode of using it was absolutely new in 
policy and practise. 

Sir, they who are friends to the schemes of American rev- 
enue say, that the commercial restraint is full as hard a law 
for America to live under. I think so, too. I think it, if 
uncompensated, to bea condition of as rigorous servitude 
as men can be subject to. But America bore it from the 
fundamental Act of Navigation until1764. Why? Because 
men do bear the inevitable constitution of their original 
nature with all its infirmities. The Act of Navigation at- 
tended the colonies from their infancy, grew with their 
growth, and strengthened with their strength. They were 
confirmed in obedience to it even more by usage than by 
law. They scarcely had remembered a time when they 
were not subject to such restraint. Besides, they were 
indemnified for it by a pecuniary compensation. Their 
monopolist happened to be one of the richest men in the 
world. By his immense capital (primarily employed, not 
for their benefit, but his own) they were enabled to proceed 
with their fisheries, their agriculture, their shipbuilding, (and 
their trade, too, within the limits, ) in such a manner as got 
far the start of the slow, languid operations of unassisted 
Nature. This capital was a hot-bed to them. Nothing in 
the history of mankind is like their progress. For my part, 
I never cast an eye on their flourishing commerce, and their 
cultivated and commodious life, but they seem to me rather 
ancient nations grown to perfection through a long series 
of fortunate events, and a train of successful industry, ac- 
cumulating wealth in many centuries, than the colonies of 


24 BURKE 


yesterday,—than a set of miserable outcasts a few years ago, 
not so much sent as thrown out on the bleak and barren 
shore of a desolate wilderness three thousand miles from all 
civilized intercourse. 

All this was done by England whilst England pursued 
trade and forgot revenue. You not only acquired commerce, 
but you actually created the very objects of trade in America; 
and by that creation you raised the trade of this kingdom 
at least four-fold. America had the compensation of your 
capital, which made her bear her servitude. She had another 
compensation, which you are now going to take away from 
her. She had, except the commercial restraint, every 
characteristic mark of a free people in all her internal con- 
cerns. She had the image of the British Constitution. She 
had the substance. She was taxed by her own representa- 
tives. She chose most of her own magistrates. She paid 
them all. She had in effect the sole disposal of her own 
internal government. This whole state of commercial 
servitude and civil liberty, taken together, is certainly 
not perfect freedom; but comparing it with the ordinary 
circumstances of human nature, it was an happy and a 
liberal condition. 

I know, Sir, that great and not unsuccessful pains have 
been taken to inflame our minds by an outcry, in this House, 
and out of it, that in America the Act of Navigation neither 
is or never was obeyed. But if you take the colonies 
through, I affirm that its authority never was disputed,— 
that it was nowhere disputed for any length of time,—and, 
on the whole, that it-was well observed. Wherever the act 
pressed hard, many individuals, indeed, evaded it. This is 
nothing. These scattered individuals never denied the law, 
and never obeyed it. Just as it happens, whenever the 
laws of trade, whenever the laws of revenue, press hard upon 
the people in England: in that case all your shores are full 
of contraband. Your right to give a monopoly to the East 
India Company, your right to lay immense duties on French 
brandy, are not disputed in England. You do not make 


AMERICAN TAXATION 25 


this charge on any man. But you know that there is not 
a creek from Pentland Frith to the Isle of Wight in which 
they do not smuggle immense quantities of teas, East India 
goods, and brandies. I takeit for granted that the authority 
of Governor Bernard in this point is indisputable. Speak- 
ing of these laws, as they regarded that part of America 
now in so unhappy a condition, he says, “1 believe they 
are nowhere better supported than in this province: I do 
not pretend that itis entirely free from a breach of these 
laws, but that such a breach, if discovered, is justly punished.” 
What more can you say of the obedience to any laws in any 
country? An obedience to these laws formed the ac- 
knowledgment, instituted by yourselves, for your superior- 
ity, and was the payment you originally imposed for your 
protection. 

Whether you were right or wrong in establishing the colo- 
nies on the principles of commercial monopoly, rather than on 
that of revenue, is at this day a problem of mere speculation, 
You can not have both by the same authority. To join to- 
gether the restraints of an universal internal and external 
monopoly with an universal internal and external taxation 
is an unnatural union,—perfect, uncompensated slavery. 
You have long since decided for yourself and them; and 
you and they have prospered exceedingly under that 
decision. 

This nation, Sir, never thought of departing from that 
choice until the period immediately on the close of the last 
war. Then ascheme of government, new in many things, 
seemed to have been adopted. I saw, or thought I saw, 
several symptoms of a great change, whilst I sat in your 
gallery, a good while before I had the honour of aseat in this 
House. At that period the necessity was established of 
keeping up no less than twenty new regiments, with twenty 
colonels capable of seats in this House. This scheme was 
adopted with very general applause from all sides, at the 
very time that, by your conquests in America, your danger 
from foreign attempts in that part of the world was much 


26 BURKE 


lessened, or indeed rather quite over. When this huge in- 
crease of military establishment was resolved on, a revenue 
was to be found to support so great a burden. Country 
gentlemen, the great patrons of economy, and the great 
resisters of a standing armed force, would not have entered 
with much alacrity into the vote for so large and so expensive 
an army, if they had been very sure that they were to con- 
tinue to pay for it. But hopes of another kind were held 
out to them; and in particular, I well remember that Mr. 
Townshend, in a brilliant harangue on this subject, did 
dazzle them by playing before their eyes the image ofa 
revenue to be raised in America. 

Here began to dawn the first glimmerings of this new 
colony system. It appeared more distinctly afterwards, 
when it was devolved upon a person to whom, on other 
accounts, this country owes very great obligations. I do 
believe that he had a very serious desire to benefit the pub- 
lic. But with no small study of the detail, he did not seem 
to have his view, at least equally, carried to the total circuit 
of our affairs. He generally considered his objects in lights 
that were rather too detached. Whether the business of an 
American revenue was imposed upon him altogether,— 
whether it was entirely the result of his own speculation, or, 
what is more probable, that his own ideas rather coincided 
with the instructions he had received,—certain it is, that, with 
the best intentions in the world, he first brought this fatal 
scheme into form, and established it by Act of Parliament. 

No man can believe, that, at this time of day, 1 mean to 
lean on the venerable memory of a great man, whose loss we 
deplore in common. Our little party differences have been 
long ago composed: and I have acted more with him, and cer- 
tainly with more pleasure with him, than ever I acted against 
him. Undoubtedly Mr. Grenville was a first-rate figure in this 
country. With a masculine understanding, and a stout and 
resolute heart, he had an application undissipated and un- 
wearied. He took public business not as a duty which he 
was to fulfil, but as a pleasure he was to enjoy; and he 


AMERICAN TAXATION 27 


seemed to have no delight out of this House, except in such 
things as some way related to the business that was to be 
done within it. If he was ambitious, I will say this for him, his 
ambition was of anoble and generous strain. It was to raise 
himself, not by the low, pimping politics of a court, but to 
win his way to power through the laborious gradations of 
public service, and to secure himself a well-earned rank in 
Parliament by a thorough knowledge of its constitution and 
a perfect practise in all its business. 

Sir, if such a man fell into errors, it must be from defects 
not intrinsical; they must be rather sought in the particular 
habits of his life, which, though they do not alter the ground- 
work of character, yet tinge it with their own hue. He was 
bred in a profession. He was bred to the law, which is, in 
my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences,— 
a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the 
understanding than all the other kinds of learning put to- 
gether ; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, 
to open and to liberalize the mind exactly in the same propor- 
tion. Passing from that study, he did not go very largely 
into the world, but plunged into business,—I mean into the 
business of office, and the limited and fixed methods and 
forms established there. Much knowledge is to be had, un- 
doubtedly, in that line; and there is no knowledge which is 
not valuable. But it may be truly said, that men too much 
conversant in office are rarely minds of remarkable enlarge- 
ment. Their habits of office are apt to give them a turn to 
think the substance of business not to be much more impor- 
tant than the forms in which it is conducted. These forms 
are adapted to ordinary occasions; and therefore persons 
who are nurtured in office do admirably well as long as 
_ things go on in their common order; but when the high- 
roads are broken up, and the waters out, when a new and 
troubled scene is opened; and the file affords no precedent, 
then it is that a greater knowledge of mankind, and a far 
more extensive comprehension of things is requisite, than 
ever office gave, or than office can ever give. Mr. Grenville 


28 BURKE 


thought better of the wisdom and power of human legisla- 
tion than in truth it deserves. He conceived, and many 
conceived along with him, that the flourishing trade of this 
country was greatly owing to law and institution, and not 
quite so much to liberty; for but too many are apt to 
believe regulation to be commerce, and taxes to be revenue. 
Among regulations, that which stood first in reputation was 
his idol: I mean the Act of Navigation. He has often pro- 
fessed it to be so. The policy of that act is, I readily admit, 
in many respects well understood. But I do say, that, if the 
act be suffered to run the full length of its principle, and is 
not changed and modified according to the change of times 
and the fluctuation of circumstances, it must do great mis- 
chief, and frequently even defeat its own purpose. 

After the war, and in the last years of it, the trade of 
America had increased far beyond the speculations of the 
most sanguine imaginations. It swelled out on every side. 
It filled all its proper channels to the brim. It overflowed 
with a rich redundance, and breaking its banks on the right 
and on the left, it spread out upon some places where it was 
indeed improper, upon others where it was only irregular. 
It is the nature of all greatness not to be exact ; and great 
trade will always be attended with considerable abuses. 
The contraband will always keep pace in some measure with 
the fair trade. It should stand as a fundamental maxim, 
that no vulgar precaution ought to be employed in the cure 
of evils which are closely connected with the cause of our 
prosperity. Perhaps this great person turned his eyes some- 
what less than was just towards the incredible increase of 
the fair trade, and looked with something of too exquisite 
a jealousy towards the contraband. He certainly felt a sin- 
gular degree of anxiety on the subject, and even began to 
act from that passion earlier than is commonly imagined. 
For whilst he was First Lord of the Admiralty, though not 
strictly called upon in his official line, he presented a very 
strong memorial to the Lords of the Treasury, (my Lord 
Bute was then at the head of the board,) heavily complain- 


AMERICAN TAXATION 29 


ing of the growth of the illicit commerce in America. 
Some mischief happened even at that time from this over- 
earnest zeal. Much greater happened afterwards, when it 
operated with greater power in the highest department of 
the finances. The bonds of the Act of Navigation were 
straitened so much that America was on the point of having 
no trade, either contraband or legitimate. They found, 
under the construction and execution then used, the act no 
longer tying, but actually strangling them. All this coming 
with new enumerations of commodities, with regulations 
which in a manner put a stop to the mutual coasting inter- 
course of the colonies, with the appointment of courts of 
admiralty under various improper circumstances, with a 
sudden extinction of the paper currencies, with a compulsory 
provision for the quartering of soldiers——the people of 
America thought themselves proceeded against as delin- 
quents, or, at best, as people under suspicion of delinquency, 
and in such a manner as they imagined their recent services 
in the war did not-at all merit. Any of these innumerable 
regulations, perhaps, would not have alarmed alone; some 
might be thought reasonable; the multitude struck them 
with terror. | 

But the grand maneuver in that business of new regula- 
ting the colonies was the fifteenth act of the fourth of George 
the Third, which, besides containing several of the matters 
to which I have just alluded, opened a new principle. And 
here properly began the second period of the policy of this 
country with regard to the colonies, by which the scheme of 
a regular plantation Parliamentary revenue was adopted in 
theory and settled in practise: a revenue not substituted in 
the place of, but superadded to, a monopoly; which mon- 
opoly was enforced at the same time with additional strict- 
ness, and the execution put into military hands, 

This act, Sir, had for the first time the title of “ granting 
duties in the colonies and plantations of America,” and for 
the first time it was asserted in the preamble “that it was 
just and necessary that a revenue should be raised there’”’; 


30 BURKE 


then came the technical words of “giving and granting.” 
And thus a complete American revenue act was made in all 
the forms, and with a full avowal of the right, equity, policy, 
and even necessity, of taxing the colonies, without any 
formal consent of theirs. There are contained also in the 
preamble to that act these very remarkable words,—the 
Commons, etc., “ being desirous to make some provision in 
the present session of Parliament towards raising the said 
revenue.” By these words it appeared to the colonies that 
this act was but a beginning of sorrows,—that every session 
was to produce something of the same kind,—that we were 
to go on, from day to day, in charging them with such taxes 
as we pleased, for such a military force as we should think 
proper. Had this plan been pursued, it was evident that 
the provincial assemblies, in which the Americans felt all 
their portion of importance, and beheld their sole image of 
freedom, were ipso facto annihilated. This ill prospect 
before them seemed to be boundless in extent and endless 
in duration. Sir, they were not mistaken. The ministry 
valued themselves when this act passed, and when they gave 
notice of the Stamp Act, that both of the duties came very 
short of their ideas of American taxation. Great was the 
applause of this measure here. In England we cried out for 
new taxes on America, whilst they cried out that they were 
nearly crushed with those which the war and their own 
grants had brought upon them. 

Sir, it has been said in the debate, that, when the first 
American revenue act (the act in 1764, imposing the port- 
duties) passed, the Americans did not object to the principle. 
It is true they touched it but very tenderly. It was nota 
direct attack. They were, it is true, as yet novices,—as yet 
unaccustomed to direct attacks upon any of the rights of 
Parliament. The duties were port-duties, like those they 
had been accustomed to bear,—with this difference, that the 
title was not the same, the preamble not the same, and the 
spirit altogether unlike. But of what service is this obser- 
vation to the cause of those that make it? It is a full 


AMERICAN TAXATION 31 


refutation of the pretense for their present cruelty to 
America ; for it shows, out of their own mouths, that our 
colonies were backward to enter into the present vexatious 
and ruinous controversy. 

There is also another circulation abroad, (spread with a 
malignant intention, which I can not attribute to those who 
say the same thing in this House,) that Mr. Grenville gave 
the colony agents an option for their assemblies to tax them- 
selves, which they had refused. I find that much stress is 
laid on this, as a fact. However, it happens neither to be 
true nor possible. I will observe, first, that Mr. Grenville 
never thought fit to make this apology for himself in the in- 
numerable debates that were had upon the subject. He 
might have proposed to the colony agents, that they should 
agree in some mode of taxation as the ground of an act of 
Parliament. But he never could have proposed that they 
should tax themselves on requisition, which is the assertion 
of the day. Indeed, Mr. Grenville well knew that the 
colony agents could have no general powers to consent to 
it; and they had no time to consult their assemblies for 
particular powers, before he passed his first revenue act. If 
you compare dates, you will find it impossible. Burdened 
as the agents knew the colonies were at that time, they 
could not give the least hope of such grants. His own 
favourite governor was of opinion that the Americans were 
not then taxable objects. 

“ Nor was the time less favourable to the equity of such a 
taxation. I don’t mean to dispute the reasonableness of 
America contributing to the charges of Great Britain, when 
she is able; nor, I believe, would the Americans themselves 
have disputed it at a proper time and season. But it should 
be considered, that the American governments themselves 
have, in the prosecution of the late war, contracted very 
large debts, which it will take some years to pay off, and in 
the mean time occasion very burdensome taxes for that pur- 
pose only. Forinstance, this government, which is as much 
beforehand as any, raises every year, 37,500/, sterling for 


32 BURKE 


sinking their debt, and must continue it for four years longer 
at least before it will be clear,” 

These are the words of Governor Bernard’s letter to a mem- 
ber of the old ministry, and which he has since printed. 

Mr. Grenville could not have made this proposition to 
the agents for another reason. He was of opinion, which he 
has declared in this House an hundred times, that the 
colonies could not legally grant any revenue to the crown, 
and that infinite mischiefs would be the consequence of such 
a power. When Mr. Grenville had passed the first revenue 
act, and in the same session had made this House come to a 
resolution for laying a stamp-duty on America, between that 
time and the passing the Stamp Act into a law he told a 
considerable and most respectable merchant, a member of 
this House, whom I am truly sorry I do not now see in his 
place, when he represented against this proceeding, that, if the 
stamp-duty was disliked, he was willing to exchange it for 
any other equally productive,—but that, if he objected to 
the Americans being taxed by Parliament, he might save 
himself the trouble of the discussion, as he was determined 
on the measure. This is the fact, and, if you please, I will 
mention a very unquestionable authority for it. 

Thus, Sir, ] have disposed of this falsehood. But false- 
hood has a perennial spring. It is said that no conjecture 
could be made of the dislike of the colonies to the principle. 
This is as untrue as the other. After the resolution of the 
House, and before the passing of the Stamp Act, the colonies 
of Massachusetts Bay and New York did send remonstrances 
objecting tothis mode of Parliamentary taxation. What was 
the consequence? They were suppressed, they were put 
under the table, notwithstanding an order of Council to the 
contrary,by the ministry which composed the very Council that 
had made the order ; and thus the House proceeded to its busi- 
ness of taxing without the least regular knowlege of the 
objections which were made to it. But to give that House 
its due, it was not over-desirous to receive information or 
to hear remonstrance. On the 15th of February, 1765, 


AMERICAN TAXATION 33 


whilst the Stamp Act was under deliberation they refused 
with scorn even so much as to receive four petitions pre- 
sented from so respectable colonies as Connecticut, Rhode 
Island, Virginia, and Carolina, besides one from the traders 
of Jamaica. As to the colonies, they had no alternative 
left to them but to disobey, or to pay the taxes imposed 
by that Parliament, which was not suffered, or did not suffer 
itself, even to hear them remonstrate upon the subject. 

This was the state of the colonies before his Majesty 
thought fit to change his ministers. It stands upon no 
authority of mine. It is proved by uncontrovertible records, 
The honourable gentleman has desired some of us to lay our 
hands upon our hearts and answer to his queries upon the 
historical part of this consideration, and by his manner (as 
well as my eyes could discern it) he seemed to address him- 
self to me. 

Sir, I will answer him as clearly as I am able, and with 
great openness: I have nothing to conceal. In the year 
sixty-five, being in a very private station, far enough from 
any line of business, and not having the honour of a seat in 
this House, it was my fortune, unknowing and unknown to 
the then ministry, by the intervention of a common friend, 
to become connected with a very noble person, and at the 
head of the Treasury Department. It was, indeed, in a 
situation of little rank and no consequence, suitable to the 
mediocrity of my talents and pretensions,—but a situation 
near enough to enable me to see, as well as others, what was 
going on; and I did see in that noble person such sound 
principles, such an enlargement of mind, such clear and 
sagacious sense, and such unshaken fortitude, as have bound 
me, as well as others much better than me, by an inviolable 
attachment to him from that time forward. | Sir, Lord 
Rockingham very early in that summer received a strong 
representation from many weighty English merchants and 
manufacturers, from governors of provinces and commanders 
of men-of-war, against almost the whole of the American 
commercial regulations,—and particularly with regard to the 

3 


34 BURKE 


total ruin which was threatened to the Spanish trade. I 
believe, Sir, the noble lord soon saw his way in this business. 
But he did not rashly determine against acts which it might 
be supposed were the result of much deliberation. How- 
ever, Sir, he scarcely began to open the ground, when the 
whole veteran body of office took the alarm. A violent out- 
cry of all (except those who knew and felt the mischief) 
was raised against any alteration. On one hand, his attempt 
was a direct violation of treaties and public law; on the 
other, the Act of Navigation and all the corps of trade-laws 
were drawn up in array against it. 

The first step the noble lord took was, to have the opinion 
of his excellent, learned, and ever-lamented friend, the late 
Mr. Yorke, then Attorney-General, on the point of law. 
When he knew that formally and officially which in sub- 
stance he had known before, he immediately despatched 
orders to redress the grievance. But I will say it for the 
then minister, he is of that constitution of mind, that I 
know he would have issued, on the same critical occasion, 
the very same orders, if the acts of trade had been, as they 
were not, directly against him and would have cheerfully 
submitted to the equity of Parliament for his indemnity. 

On the conclusion of this business of the Spanish trade, 
the news of the troubles on account of the Stamp Act 
arrived in England. It was not until the end of October 
that these accounts were received. Nosooner had the sound 
of that mighty tempest reached us in England, than the 
whole of the then opposition, instead of feeling humbled by 
the unhappy issue of their measures, seemed to be infinitely 
elated, and cried out, that the ministry, from envy to the 
glory of their predecessors, were prepared to repeal the 
Stamp Act. Near nine yearsafter, the honourable gentleman 
takes quite opposite ground, and now challenges me to put 
my hand to my heart and say whether the ministry had re- 
solved on the repeal till a considerable time after the meet- 
ing of Parliament. Though I do not very well know what 
thehonourablegentleman wishes to infer from the admission 


AMERICAN TAXATION 35 


or from the denial of this fact on which he so earnestly ad- 
jures me, I do put my hand on my heart and assure him 
that they did not come to a resolution directly to repeal. 
They weighed this matter as its difficulty and importance 
required. They considered maturely among themselves. 
They consulted with all who could give advice or informa- 
tion. It was not determined until a little before the meet- 
ing of Parliament; but it was determined, and the main 
lines of their own plan marked out, before that meeting. 
Two questions arose. I hope I am not going into a narrative 
troublesome to the House. [A cry of ‘‘Go on, go on!”’] 

The first of the two considerations was, whether the re- 
peal should be total, or whether only partial,—taking out 
everything burdensome and productive, and reserving only 
an empty acknowledgment, such as a stamp on cards or 
dice. The other question was, on what principle the act 
should be repealed. On this head also two principles were 
started. One, that the legislative rights of this country with 
regard to America were not entire, but had certain restric- 
tionsand limitations. The other principle was, that taxes of 
this kind were contrary to the fundamental principles of 
commerce on which the colonies were founded, and contrary 
to every idea of political equity,—by which equity we are 
bound as much as possible to extend the spirit and benefit 
of the British Constitution to every part of the British do- 
minions. The option, both of the measure and of the princi- 
ple of repeal, was made before the session; and I wonder 
how any one can read the king’s speech at the opening of 
that session, without seeing in that speech both the repeal 
and the Declaratory Act very sufficiently crayoned out. 
Those who can not see this can see nothing. 

Surely the honourable gentleman will not think that a great 
deal less time than was then employed ought to have been 
spent in deliberation, when he considers that the news of 
the troubles did not arrive till towards the end of October. 
The Parliament sat to fill the vacancies on the 14th day of 
December, and on business the 14th of the following January. 


36 BURKE 


Sir, a partial repeal, or, as the bon-ton of the court then 
was, a modification, would have satisfied a timid, unsystem- 
atic, procrastinating ministry, as such a measure has since 
done sucha ministry. A modification is the constant re- 
source of weak, undeciding minds. To repeal by a denial of 
our right to tax in the preamble (and this, too, did not want 
advisers) would have cut, in the heroic style, the Gordian 
knot with a sword. Either measure would have cost no 
more than a day’s debate. But when the total repeal was 
adopted, and adopted on principles of policy, of equity, and 
of commerce, this plan made it necessary to enter into many 
and difficult measures. It became necessary to open a very 
large field of evidence commensurate to these extensive 
views. But thenthislabour did knights’ service. It opened 
the eyes of several to the true state of the American affairs ; 
it enlarged their ideas ; it removed prejudices; and it con- 
ciliated the opinions and affections of men. The noble lord 
who then took the lead in administration, my honourable 
friend ® under me, and a right honourable gentleman’ (if he 
will not reject his share, and it was a large one, of this busi- 
ness) exerted the most laudable industry in bringing before 
you the fullest, most impartial, and least garbled body of 
evidence that ever was produced to this House. I think the 
inquiry lasted in the committee for six weeks; and at its 
conclusion, this House, by an independent, noble, spirited, 
and unexpected majority, by a majority that will redeem all 
the acts ever done by majorities in Parliament, in the teeth 
of all the old mercenary Swiss of state, in despite of all the 
speculators and augurs of political events, in defiance of the 
whole embattled legion of veteran pensioners and practised 
instruments of a court, gave a total repeal to the Stamp Act, 
and (if it had been so permitted) a lasting peace to this whole 
empire. 

I state, Sir, these particulars, because this act of spirit and 
fortitude has lately been, in the circulation of the season, 
and in some hazarded declamations in this House, attributed 
to: timidity. If, Sir, the conduct of ministry, in proposing 


AMERICAN TAXATION 37 


the repeal, had arisen from timidity with regard to them- 
selves, it would have been greatly to be condemned. _Inter- 
ested timidity disgraces as much in the cabinet as personal 
timidity does in the field. But timidity with regard to the 
well-being of our country is heroic virtue. The noble lord 
who then conducted affairs, and his worthy colleagues, whilst 
they trembled at the prospect of such distresses as you have 
since brought upon yourselves, were not afraid steadily to 
look in the face that glaring and dazzling influence at which 
the eyes of eagles have blenched. He looked in the face 
one of the ablest, and, let me say, not the most scrupulous 
oppositions, that perhaps ever was in this House; and with- 
stood it, unaided by even one of the usual supports of ad-. 
ministration. He did this, when he repealed the Stamp 
Act. He looked in the face a person he had long respected 
and regarded, and whose aid was then particularly wanting : 
I mean Lord Chatham. He did this when he passed the 
Declaratory Act. 

It is now given out, for the usual purposes, by the usual 
emissaries, that Lord Rockingham did not consent to the 
repeal of this act until he was bullied into it by Lord Chat- 
ham; and the reporters have gone so far as publicly to 
assert, in an hundred companies, that the honourable gentle- 
man under the gallery,’ who proposed the repeal in the 
American committee, had another set of resolutions in his 
pocket, directly the reverse of those he moved. These arti- 
fices of a desperate cause are at this time spread abroad 
with incredible care, in every part of the town, from the 
highest to the lowest companies; as if the industry of the 
circulation were to make amends for the absurdity of the 
report. 

Sir, whether the noble lord is of a complexion to be bul- 
lied by Lord Chatham, or by any man, I must submit to 
those who know him. I confess, when I look back to that 
time, I consider him as placed in one of the most trying 
situations in which, perhaps, any man ever stood. In the 
House of Peers there were very few of the ministry, out of 


38 BURKE 


the noble lord’s own particular connection, (except Lord Eg- 
mont, who acted, as far as I could discern, an honourable and 
manly part,) that did not look to some other future arrange- 
ment, which warped his politics. There were in both Houses 
new and menacing appearances, that might very naturally 
drive any other than a most resolute minister from his meas- 
ure or from his station. The household troops openly re- 
volted. The allies of ministry (those, I mean, who sup- 
ported some of their measures, but refused responsibility 
for any) endeavoured to undermine their credit, and to take 
ground that must be fatal to the success of the very cause 
which they would be thought to countenance. The ques- 
tion of the repeal was brought on by ministry in the com- 
mittee of this House in the very instant when it was known 
that more than one court negotiation was carrying on with 
the heads of the opposition. Everything, upon every side, 
was full of traps and mines. Earth below shook; heaven 
above menaced; all the elements of ministerial safety were 
dissolved. It was in the midst of this chaos of plots and 
counterplots, it was in the midst of this complicated war- 
fare against public opposition and private treachery, that 
the firmness of that noble person was put to the proof. He 
never stirred from his ground: no, not an inch. He re- 
mained fixed and determined, in principle, in measure, and 
in conduct. He practised no managements. Hesecured no 
retreat. He sought no apology. 

I will likewise do justice—I ought to do it—to the honour- 
able gentleman who led us in this House.® Far from the 
duplicity wickedly charged on him, he acted his part with 
alacrity and resolution. We all felt inspired by the example 
he gave us, down even to myself, the weakest in that pha- 
lanx. I declare for one, I knew well enough (it could not 
be concealed from anybody) the true state of things; but, in 
my life, I never came with so much spirits into this House. 
It was a time for a man to act in. We had powerful 
enemies; but we had faithful and determined friends, and 
a glorious cause. We had a great battle to fight ; but we 


AMERICAN TAXATION 39 


had the means of fighting: not as now, when our arms 
are tied behind us. We did fight that day, and con- 
quer. , | 

I remember, Sir, with a melancholy pleasure, the situation 
of the honourable gentleman? who made the motion for the 
repeal: in that crisis, when the whole trading interest of this 
empire, crammed into your lobbies, with a trembling and 
anxious expectation, waited, almost to a winter’s return of 
light, their fate from your resolutions. When at length you 
had determined in their favour, and your doors thrown open 
showed them the figure of their deliverer in the well-earned 
triumph of his important victory, from the whole of that 
grave multitude there arose an involuntary burst of gratitude 
and transport. They jumped upon him like children on a 
long absent father. They clung about him as captives about 
their redeemer. All England, all America, joined in his ap- 
plause. Nor did he seem insensible to the best of all earthly 
rewards, the love and admiration of his fellow-citizens. 
Hope elevated and joy brightened his crest. I stood near 
him; and his face, to use the expression of the Scripture of 
the first martyr, “his face was as if it had been the face of 
an angel.” I do not know how others feel; but if I had 
stood in that situation, I never would have exchanged it for 
all that kings in their profusion could bestow. I did hope 
that that day’s danger and honour would have been a bond 
to hold us all together forever. But, alas! that, with other 
pleasing visions, is long since vanished. 

Sir, this act of supreme magnanimity has been represented 
as if it had been a measure of an administration that, having 
no scheme of their own, took a middle line, pilfered a bit 
from one side and a bit from the other. Sir, they took no 
middle lines. They differed fundamentally from the schemes 
of both parties; but they preserved the objects of both. 
They preserved the authority of Great Britain; they pre- 
served the equity of Great Britain. They made the Declar- 
atory Act; they repealed the Stamp Act. They did both 
fully: because the Declaratory Act was without qualifica- 


40 BURKE 


tion; and the repeal of the Stamp Act total. This they did 
in the situation I have described. 

Now, Sir, what will the adversary say to both these acts? 
If the principle of the Declaratory Act was not good, the 
principle we are contending for this day is monstrous. If 
the principle of the repeal was not good, why are we not at 
war fora real, substantial, effective revenue? If both were 
bad, why has this ministry incurred all the inconveniences 
of both and of all schemes ? why have they enacted, repealed, 
enforced, yielded, and now attempt to enforce again ? 

Sir, I think I may as well now as at any other time speak 
to a certain matter of fact not wholly unrelated to the ques- 
tion under your consideration. We, who would persuade 
you to revert to the ancient policy of this kingdom, labour 
under the effect of this short current phrase, which the court 
leaders have given out to all their corps, in order to take 
away the credit of those who would prevent you from that 
frantic war you are going to wage upon your colonies. 
Their cant is this: “ All the disturbances in America have 
been created by the repeal of the Stamp Act.” I suppress 
for a moment my indignation at the falsehood, baseness, and 
absurdity of this most audacious assertion. Instead of re- 
marking on the motives and character of those who have 
issued it for circulation, I will clearly lay before you the state 
of America, antecedently to that repeal, after the repeal, and 
since the renewal of the schemes of American taxation. 

It is said, that the disturbances, if there were any before 
the repeal, were slight, and without difficulty or inconven- 
ience might have been suppressed. For an answer to this 
assertion I will send you to the great author and patron of 
the Stamp Act, who, certainly meaning well to the author- 
ity of this country, and fully apprised of the state of that, 
made, before a repeal was so much as agitated in this House, 
the motion which is on your journals, and which, to save the 
clerk the trouble of turning to it, I will now read to you. 
It was for an amendment to the address of the 17th of De- 
cember, 1765. 


AMERICAN TAXATION 4!I 


‘“To express our just resentment and indignation at the 
outrageous tumults and insurrections which have been ex- 
cited and carried on in North America, and at the resistance 
given, by open and rebellious force, to the execution of the 
laws in that part of his Majesty’s dominions; to assure his 
Majesty, that his faithful Commons, animated with the 
warmest duty and attachment to his royal person and gov- 
ernment, . . . will firmly and effectually support his Majesty 
in all such measures as shall be necessary for preserving and 
securing the legal dependence of the colonies upon this their 
mother country,” etc., etc. 

Here was certainly a disturbance preceding the repeal,— 
such a disturbance as Mr. Grenville thought necessary to 
qualify by the name of an insurrection, and the epithet of a 
rebellious force: terms much stronger than any by which 
those who then supported his motion have ever since thought 
proper to distinguish the subsequent disturbances in Amer- 
ica. They were disturbances which seemed to him and his 
friends to justify as strong a promise of support as hath 
been usual to give in the beginning of a war with the most 
powerful and declared enemies. When the accounts of the 
American governors came before the House, they appeared 
stronger even than the warmth of public imagination had 
painted them : so much stronger, that the papers on your table 
bear me out in saying that all the late disturbances, which 
have been at one time the minister’s motives forthe repeal of 
five out of six of the new court taxes, and are now his pre- 
tenses for refusing to repeal that sixth, did not amount—why 
do I compare them ?—no, not to a tenth part of the tumults 
and violence which prevailed long before the repeal of that act. 

Ministry can not refuse the authority of the commander- 
in-chief, General Gage, who, in his letter of the 4th of No- 
vember, from New York, thus represents the state of 
things :— 

“Tt is difficult to say, from the highest to the lowest, who 
has not been accessory to this insurrection, either by writ- 
ing, or mutual agreements to oppose the act, by what they 


42 BURKE 


are pleased to term all legal opposition to it.. Nothing effect- 
ual has been proposed, either to prevent or quell the tu- 
mult. The rest of the provinces are in the same situation, 
as to a positive refusal to take the stamps, and threatening 
those who shall take them to plunder and murder them; 
and this affair stands in all the provinces, that, unless the 
act from its own nature enforce itself, nothing but a very 
considerable military force can do it.” 

It is remarkable, Sir, that the persons who formerly trum- 
peted forth the most loudly the violent resolutions of 
assemblies, the universal insurrections, the seizing and burn- 
ing the stamped papers, the forcing stamp officers to resign 
their commissions under the gallows, the rifling and pulling 
down of the houses of magistrates, and the expulsion from 
their country of all who dared to write or speak a single word 
in defense of the powers of Parliament,—these very trumpet- 
ers are now the men that represent the whole asa mere trifle, 
and choose to date all the disturbances from the repeal of the 
Stamp Act, which put an end to them. Hear your officers 
abroad, and let them refute this shameless falsehood, who, 
in all their correspondence, state the disturbances as owing 
to their true causes, the discontent of the people from the 
taxes. You have this evidence in your own archives; and 
it will give you complete satisfaction, if you are not so far 
lost to all Parliamentary ideas of information as rather to 
credit the lie of the day than the records of your own 
House. 

Sir, this vermin of court reporters, when they are forced 
into day upon one point, are sure to burrow in another: but 
they shall have no refuge; I will make them bolt out of all 
their holes. Conscious that they must be baffled, when they 
attribute a precedent disturbance to a subsequent measure, 
they take other ground, almost as absurd, but very common 
in modern practice, and very wicked ; which is, to attribute 
the ill effect of ill-judged conduct to the arguments which 
had been used to dissuade us from it. They say, that the 
opposition made in Parliament to the Stamp Act, at the 


AMERICAN TAXATION 43 


time of its passing, encouraged the Americans to their resis- 
tance. This has even formally appeared in print in a regu- 
lar volume from an advocate of that faction,—a Dr. Tucker. 
This Dr. Tucker is already a dean,and his earnest labours in this 
vineyard will,I suppose,raise him to a bishopric. But this asser- 
tion, too, just like the rest, is false. In all the papers which 
have loaded your table, in all the vast crowd of verbal wit- 
nesses that appeared at your bar, witnesses which were indis- 
criminately produced from both sides of the House, not the 
least hint of such a cause of disturbance has ever appeared. 
As to the fact of a strenuous opposition to the Stamp Act, I 
sat as a stranger in your gallery when the act was under con- 
sideration. Far from anything inflammatory, I never heard 
a more languid debate in this House. Nomore than two or 
three gentlemen, as I remember, spoke against the act, and 
that with great reserve and remarkable temper. There was 
but one division in the whole progress of the bill; and the 
minority did not reach to more than 39 or 40. Inthe House 
of Lords I do not recollect that there was any debate or 
division at all. I am sure there was no protest. In fact, 
the affair passed with so very, very little noise, that in town 
they scarcely knew the nature of what you were doing. The 
opposition to the bill in England never could have done 
this mischief, because there scarcely ever was less of opposi- 
tion to a bill of consequence. 

Sir, the agents and distributors of falsehoods have, with 
their usual industry, circulated another lie, of the same 
nature with the former. It is this: that the disturbances 
arose from the account which had been received in America 
of the changeinthe ministry. No longer awed, it seems, with 
the spirit of the former rulers, they thought themselves a 
match for what our calumniators choose to qualify by the 
name of so feeble a ministry as succeeded. Feeble in one 
sense these men certainly may be called: for, with all their 
efforts, and they have made many, they have not been able 
to resist the distempered vigour and insane alacrity with 
which you are rushing to your ruin. But it does so happen, 


A4 BURKE. 


that the falsity of this circulation is (like the rest) demon- 
strated by indisputable dates and records. 

So little was the change known in America, that the let- 
ters of your governors, giving an account of these disturb- 
ances long after they had arrived at their highest pitch, were 
all directed to the old ministry, and particularly to the Earl 
of Halifax, the Secretary of State corresponding with the 
colonies, without once in the smallest degree intimating the 
slightest suspicion of any ministerial revolution whatsoever. 
The ministry was not changed in England untilthe 1oth day 
of July, 1765. On the 14th of the preceding June, Gov- 
ernor Fauquier, from Virginia, writes thus,—and writes thus 
to the Earl of Halifax :—‘‘ Government is set at defiance, 
not having strength enough in her hands to enforce obedience 
to the laws of the community.—The private distress, which 
every man feels, increases the general dissatisfaction at the 
duties laid by the Stamp Act, which breaks out and shows 
itself upon every trifling occasion.” The general dissatis- 
faction had produced some time before, that is, on the 29th 
of May, several strong public resolves against the Stamp 
Act; and those resolves are assigned by Governor Bernard as 
the cause of the insurrections in Massachusetts Bay, in his 
letter of the 15th of August, still addressed to the Earl of 
Halifax; and he continued to address such accounts to 
that minister quite to the 7th of September of the same 
year. Similar accounts, and of as late a date, were sent from 
other governors, and all directed to Lord Halifax. Not one of 
these letters indicates the slightest idea of a change, either 
known or even apprehended. 

Thus are blown away the insect race of courtly falsehoods ! 
Thus perish the miserable inventions of the wretched run- 
ners for a wretched cause, which they have fly-blown into 
every weak and rotten part of the country, in vain hopes, 
that, when their maggots had taken wing, their importunate 
buzzing might sound something like the public voice! 

Sir, I have troubled you sufficiently with the state of 
America before the repeal. Now I turn to the honourable 


AMERICAN TAXATION 45 


gentleman who sostoutly challenges us to tell whether, after 
the repeal, the provinces were quiet. This is coming home 
to the point. Here I meet him directly, and answer most 
readily, They were quiet. And I, in my turn, challenge 
him to prove when, and where, and by whom, and in what 
numbers, and with what violence, the other laws of trade, as 
gentlemen assert, were violated in consequence of your con- 
cession, or that even your other revenue laws were attacked. 
But I quit the vantage-ground on which I stand, and where 
I might leave the burden of the proof upon him: I walk 
down upon the open plain, and undertake to show that they 
were not only quiet, but showed many unequivocal marks 
of acknowledgment and gratitude. And to give him every 
advantage, I select the obnoxious colony of Massachusetts 
Bay, which at this time (but without hearing her) is so 
heavily a culprit before Parliament: I will select their pro- 
ceedings even under circumstances of no small irritation. 
For, a little imprudently, I must say, Governor Bernard 
mixed in the administration of the lenitive of the repeal no 
small acrimony arising from matters of a separate nature. 
Yet see, Sir, the effect of that lenitive, though mixed with 
these bitter ingredients,—and how this rugged people can 
express themselves on a measure of concession. 

“Tf it is not now in our power,” (say they, in their address 
to Governor Bernard,) “sin so full a manner as will be ex- 
pected, to show our respectful gratitude to the mother 
country, or to make a dutiful, affectionate return to the in- 
dulgence of the King and Parliament, it shall be no fault of 
ours ; for this we intend, and hope shall be able fully to 
enéct.”’ 

Would to God that this temper had been cultivated, 
managed, and set in action! Other effects than those which 
we have since felt would have resulted from it. On the re- 
quisition for compensation to those who had suffered from 
the violence of the populace, in the same address they say, 
—‘The recommendation enjoined by Mr. Secretary Con- 
way’s letter, and in consequence thereof made to us, we shall 


46 BURKE 


embrace the first convenient opportunity to consider and 
act upon.” They did consider; they did act upon it. 
They obeyed the requisition. I know the mode has been 
chicaned upon ; but it was substantially obeyed, and much 
better obeyed than I fear the Parliamentary requisition of 
this session will be, though enforced by all your rigour and 
backed with all your power. In a word, the damages of 
popular fury were compensated by legislative gravity. Al- 
most every other part of America in various ways demon- 
strated their gratitude. Iam bold to say, that so sudden a 
calm recovered after so violent a storm is without parallel 
in history. To say that no other disturbance should hap- 
pen from any other cause is folly. But as far as appearances 
went, by the judicious sacrifice of one law you procured an 
acquiescence in all that remained. After this experience, 
nobody shall persuade me, when an whole people are con- 
cerned, that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation. 

I hope the honourable gentleman has received a fair and 
full answer to his question. 

I have done with the third period of your policy,—that 
of your repeal, and the return of your ancient system, and 
your ancient tranquillity and concord. Sir, this period was 
not as long as it was happy. Another scene was opened, 
and other actors appeared on the stage. The state, in the 
condition I have described it, was delivered into the hands 
of Lord Chatham, a great and celebrated name,—a name 
that keeps the name of this country respectable in every 
other on the globe. It may be truly called 


“ Clarum et venerabile nomen 
Gentibus, et multum nostrze quod proderat urbi.” 


Sir, the venerable age of this great man, his merited rank, 
his superior eloquence, his splendid qualities, his eminent serv- 
ices, the vast space he fills in the eye of mankind, and, 
more than all the rest, his fall from power, which, like death, 
canonizes and sanctifies a great character, will not suffer me 
to censure any part of his conduct. lam afraid to flatter 


AMERICAN TAXATION 47 


him ; I am sure I am not disposed to blame him. Let 
those who have betrayed him by their adulation insult him 
with their malevolence. But what I do not presume to cen- 
sure I may have leave to lament. For a wise man, he 
seemed to me at that time to be governed too much by 
general maxims. I speak with the freedom of history, and 
I hope without offense. One or two of these maxims, 
flowing from an opinion not the most indulgent to our un- 
happy species, and surely a little too general, led him into 
measures that were greatly mischievous to himself, and for 
that reason, among others, perhaps fatal to his country,— 
measures, the effects of which, I am afraid, are forever incur- 
able. He made an administration so checkered and speck- 
led, he put together a piece of joinery so crossly indented 
and whimsically dovetailed, a cabinet so variously inlaid, 
such a piece of diversified mosaic, such a tessellated pave- 
ment without cement,—here a bit of black stone and there 
a bit of white, patriots and courtiers, king’s friends and re- 
publicans, Whigs and Tories, treacherous friends and open 
enemies,—that it was, indeed, a very curious show, but ut- 
terly unsafe to touch and unsure to stand on. The col- 
leagues whom he had assorted at the same boards stared 
at each other, and were obliged to ask,—“ Sir, your name?” 
—‘ Sir, you have the advantage of me.” —‘“ Mr. Such-a-one.” 
——“I beg a thousand pardons.’’—I venture to say, it did so 
happen that persons had a single office divided between 
them, who had never spoke to each other in their lives, un- 
til they found themselves, they knew not how, pigging to- 
gether, heads and points, in the same truckle-bed.! 

Sir, in consequence of this arrangement, having put so 
much the larger part of his enemies and opposers into 
power, the confusion was such that his own principles could 
not possibly have any effect or influence in the conduct of 
affairs. If ever he fell into a fit of the gout, or if any other 
cause withdrew him from public cares, principles directly 
the contrary were sure to predominate. When he had 
executed his plan, he had not an inch of ground to stand 


48 BURKE 


upon. When he had accomplished his scheme of adminis- 
tration, he was no longer a minister. 

When his face was hid but for a moment, his whole 
system was on a wide sea without chart or compass. The 
gentlemen, his particular friends, who, with the names of 
various departments of ministry, were admitted to seem as 
if they acted a part under him, with a modesty that becomes 
all men, and with a confidence in him which was justified 
even in its extravagance by his superior abilities, had never 
in any instance presumed upon any opinion of their own, 
Deprived of his guiding influence, they were whirled about, 
the sport of every gust, and easily driven into any port; 
and as those who joined with them in manning the vessel 
were the most directly opposite to his opinions, measures, 
and character, and far the most artful and most powerful of 
the set, they easily prevailed, so as to seize upon the vacant, 
unoccupied, and derelict minds of ‘his friends, and instantly 
they turned the vessel wholly out of the course of his 
policy. As if it were to insult as well as to betray him, 
even long before the close of the first session of his admin- 
istration, when everything was publicly transacted, and with 
great parade, in his name, they made an act declaring it 
highly just and expedient to raise a revenue in America. 
For even then, Sir, even before this splendid orb was entirely 
set, and while the western horizon was in a blaze with his 
descending glory, on the opposite quarter of the heavens 
arose another luminary, and for his hour became lord of the 
ascendant. 

This light, too, is passed and set forever. You under- 
stand, to be sure, that I speak of Charles Townshend, offi- 
cially the reproducer of this fatal scheme, whom I can not 
even now remember without some degree of sensibility. In 
truth, Sir, he was the delight and ornament of this House, 
and the charm of every private society which he honoured 
with his presence. Perhaps there never arose in this country, 
nor in any country, a man of a more pointed and finished 
wit, and (where his passions were not concerned) of a more 


AMERICAN TAXATION 49 


refined, exquisite, and penetrating judgment. If he had not 
so great a stock as some have had, who flourished formerly, 
of knowledge long treasured up, he knew, better by far 
than any man I ever was acquainted with, how to bring 
together within a short time all that was necessary to 
establish, to illustrate, and to decorate that side of the 
question he supported. He stated his matter skilfully and 
powerfully. He particularly excelled. in a most luminous 
explanation and display of his subject. His style of argu- 
ment was neither trite and vulgar, nor subtle and abstruse. 
He hit the House just between wind and water. And not 
being troubled with too anxious a zeal for any matter in 
question, he was never more tedious or more earnest than 
the preconceived opinions and present temper of his hearers 
required, to whom he was always in perfect unison. He 
conformed exactly to the temper of the House; and he 
seemed to guide, because he was always sure to follow it. 

I beg pardon, Sir, if when I speak of this and of other 
great men, I appear to digress in saying something of their 
characters. In this eventful history of the revolutions of 
America, the characters of such men are of much importance. 
Great men are the guideposts and landmarks inthe state. The 
credit of such men at court or in the nation is the sole cause 
of all the public measures. It would be an invidious thing 
(most foreign, I trust, to what you think my disposition) to 
remark the errors into which the authority of great names 
has brought the nation, without doing justice at the same 
time to the great qualities whence that authority arose. 
The subject is instructive to those who wish to form them- 
selves on whatever of excellence has gone before them. 
There are many young members in the House (such of late 
has been the rapid succession of public men) who never saw 
that prodigy, Charles Townshend, nor of course know what 
a ferment he was able to excite in everything by the violent 
ebullition of his mixed virtues and failings. For failings he 
had undoubtedly,—many of us remember them; we are 


this day considering the effect of them, But he had no fail- 
4 


50 BURKE 


ings which were not owing to a noble cause,—to an ardent, 
generous, perhaps an immoderate passion for fame: a pas- 
sion which is the instinct of all great souls. He worshiped 
that goddess, wheresoever she appeared; but he paid his 
particular devotions to her in her favourite habitation, in her 
chosen temple, the House of Commons. Besides the charac- 
ters of the individuals that compose our body, it is impos- 
sible, Mr. Speaker, not to observe that this House has a col- 
lective character of its own. That character, too, however 
imperfect, is not unamiable. Like all great public collec- 
tions of men, you possess a marked love of virtue and an 
abhorrence of vice. But among vices there is none which 
the House abhors in the same degree with obstinacy. Ob- 
stinacy, Sir, is certainly a great vice; and in the changeful 
state of political affairs it is frequently the cause of great 
mischief. It happens, however, very unfortunately, that al- 
most the whole line of the great and masculine virtues, con- 
stancy, gravity, magnanimity, fortitude, fidelity, and firm- 
ness, are closely allied to this disagreeable quality, of which 
you have so just an abhorrence; and, in their excess, all these 
virtues very easily fallinto it. He who paid such a punc- 
tilious attention to all your feelings certainly took care not to 
shock them by that vice which is the most disgustful to you. 

That fear of displeasing those who ought most to be 
pleased betrayed him sometimes into the other extreme. 
He had voted, and, in the year 1765, had been an advocate for 
the Stamp Act. Things and the disposition of men’s minds 
were changed. In short, the Stamp Act began tobe no 
favourite inthis House. He therefore attended at the pri- 
vate meeting in which the resolutions moved by a right hon- 
ourable gentleman were settled : resolutions leading to the 
repeal. The next day he voted for that repeal; and he 
would have spoken for it, too, if an illness (not, as was then 
given out, a political, but, to my knowledge, a very real 
illness) had not prevented it. 

The very next session, as the fashion of this world passeth 
away, the repeal began to be in as bad an odour in this House 


AMERICAN TAXATION 5I 


as the Stamp Act had been in the session before. To con- 
form to the temper which began to prevail, and to prevail 
mostly amongst those most in power, he declared, very early 
in the winter, that a revenue must be had out of America. 
Instantly he was tied down to his engagements by some, 
who had no objection to such experiments, when made at 
the cost of persons for whom they had no particular regard. 
The whole body of courtiers drove him onward. They 
always talked as if the king stood in a sort of humiliated 
state, until something of the kind should be done. 

Here this extraordinary man, then Chancellor of the Ex- 
chequer, found himself in great straits. To please univers- 
ally was the object of his life; but to tax and to please, no 
more than to love and to be wise, is not given to men. 
However, he attempted it. To render the tax palatable to 
the partisans of American revenue, he made a preamble 
stating the necessity of such a revenue. To close with the 
American distinction, this revenue was external or port- 
duty; but, again, to soften it to the other party, it was a 
duty of supply. To gratify the colonists, it was laid on 
British manufactures; to satisfy the merchants of Britain, 
the duty was trivial, and (except that on tea, which touched 
only the devoted East India Company) on none of the grand 
objects of commerce. To counterwork the American con- 
traband, the duty on tea was reduced from a shilling to 
three-pence; but to secure the favour of those who would tax 
America, the scene of collection was changed, and, with the 
rest, it was levied in the colonies. What need I say more? 
This fine-spun scheme had the usual fate of all exquisite 
policy. But the original plan of the duties, and the mode 
of executing that plan, both arose singly and solely from a 
love of our applause. He was truly the child of the House. 
He never thought, did, or said anything, but with a view to 
you. He every day adapted himself to your disposition, 
and adjusted himself before it as at a looking-glass. 

He had observed (indeed, it could not escape him) that 
several persons, infinitely his inferiors in all respects, had 


52 BURKE 


formerly rendered themselves considerable in this House by 
one method alone. They were a race of men (I hope in 
God the species is extinct) who, when they rose in their 
place, no man living could divine, from any known adher- 
ence to parties, to opinions, or to principles, from any order 
or system in their politics, or from any sequel or connection 
in their ideas, what part they were going to take in any de- 
bate. It is astonishing how much this uncertainty, especially 
at critical times, called the attention of all parties on such 
men. All eyes were fixed on them, all ears open to hear 
them; each party gaped, and looked alternately for their 
vote, almost to the end of their speeches. While the House 
hung in this uncertainty, now the hear-hims rose from this 
side, now they rebellowed from the other; and that party 
to whom they fell at length from their tremulous and danc- 
ing balance always received them in a tempest of applause. 
The fortune of such men was a temptation too great to be 
resisted by one to whom a single whiff of incense withheld 
gave much greater pain than he received delight in the 
clouds of it which daily rose about him from the prodigal 
superstition of innumerable admirers. He was a candidate 
for contradictory honours; and his great aim was, to make 
those agree in admiration of him who never agreed in any- 
thing else. 

Hence arose this unfortunate act, the subject of this day’s 
debate: from a disposition which, after making an American 
revenue to please one, repealed it to please others, and 
again revived it in hopes of pleasing a third, and of catching 
something in the ideas of all. 

This revenue act of 1767 formed the fourth period of 
American policy. How we have fared since then: what 
woful variety of schemes have been adopted; what enforc- 
ing, and what repealing; what bullying, and what submit- 
ting; what doing, and undoing; what straining, and what 
relaxing; what assemblies dissolved for not obeying, and 
called again without obedience; what troops sent out to 
quell resistance, and, on meeting that resistance, recalled ; 


+ 
ot 
Bs" 


nt 
he 


ay 


AMERICAN TAXATION 53 


what shiftings, and changes, and jumblings of all kinds of 
men at home, which left no possibility of order, consistency, 
vigour, orevenso much asa decent unity of colour, in any 
one public measure It is a tedious, irksome task. My 
duty may call me to open it out some other time; on a 
former occasion # I tried your temper on a part of ith for 
the present I shall forbear. 

After all these changes and agitations, your immediate 
situation upon the question on your paper is at length 
brought to this. You have an act of Parliament stating 
that “‘ it is expedient to raise a revenue in America.” Bya 
partial repeal you annihilated the greatest part of that rev- 
enue which this preamble declares to be so expedient. 
You have substituted no other in the place of it. <A 
Secretary of State has disclaimed, in the king’s name, all 
thoughts of such a substitution in future. The principle of 
this disclaimer goes to what has been left, as well as what 
has been repealed. The tax which lingers after its com- 
panions (under a preamble declaring an American revenue 
expedient, and for the sole purpose of supporting the theory 
of that preamble) militates with the assurance authentically 
conveyed to the colonies, and is an exhaustless source of 
jealousy and animosity. On this state, which I take to bea 
fair one,—not being able to discern any grounds of honour, 
advantage, peace, or power, for adhering, either to the act 
or to the preamble, I shall vote for the question which leads 
to the repeal of both. 

If you do not fall in with this motion, then secure some- 
thing to fight for, consistent in theory and valuable in 
practise. If you must employ your strength, employ it 
to uphold you in some honourable right or some profitable 
wrong. If you are apprehensive that the concession rec- 
ommended to you, though proper, should be a means of 
drawing on you further, but unreasonable claims,—why, 
then employ your force in supporting that reasonable con- 
cession against those unreasonable demands. You will em- 
ploy it with more grace, with bettereffect,and with great 


54 BURKE 


probable concurrence of all the quiet and rational people in 
the provinces, who are now united with and hurried away 
by the violent,—having, indeed, different dispositions, but a 
common interest. If you apprehend that ona concession 
you shall be pushed by metaphysical process to the extreme 
lines, and argued out of your whole authority, my advice is 
this: when you have recovered your old, your strong, your 
tenable position, then face about,—stop short,—do nothing 
more,—reason not at all,—oppose the ancient policy and 
practise of the empire as a rampart against the speculations 
of innovators on both sides of the question,—and you will 
stand on great, manly, and sure ground. On this solid basis 
fix your machines, and they will draw worlds towards you. 

Your ministers, in their own and his Majesty’s name, have 
already adopted the American distinction of internal and 
external duties. It is a distinction, whatever merit it may 
have, that was originally moved by the Americans them- 
selves; and I think they will acquiesce in it, if they are not 
pushed with too much logic and too little sense, in all the 
consequences: that is, if external taxation be understood, as 
they and you understand it, when you please, to be nota 
distinction of geography, but of policy; that it isa power 
for regulating trade, and not for supporting establishments. 
The distinction, which is as nothing with regard to right, is 
of most weighty consideration in practise. Recover your 
old ground, and your old tranquillity; try it; I am per- 
suaded the Americans will compromise with you. When 
confidence is once restored, the odious and suspicious 
summum jus will perish of course. The spirit of practica- 
bility, of moderation, and mutual convenience will never call 
in geometrical exactness as the arbitrator of an amicable 
settlement. Consult and follow your experience. Let not 
the long story with which I have exercised your patience 
prove fruitless to your interests. 

For my part, I should choose (if I could have my wish) 
that the proposition of the honourable gentleman * for the 
repeal could go to America without the attendance of the 


AMERICAN TAXATION 55 


penal bills. Alone I could almost answer for its success. 
I can not be certain of its reception in the bad company it 
may keep. In such heterogeneous assortments, the most 
innocent person will lose the effect of his innocency. 
Though you should send out this angel of peace, yet you 
are sending out a destroying angel too; and what would be 
the effect of the conflict of these two adverse spirits, or 
which would predominate in the end, is what I dare not 
say: whether the lenient measures would cause American 
passion to subside, or the severe would increase its fury,— 
all this is in the hand of Providence. Yet now, even now, I 
should confide in the prevailing virtue and efficacious oper- 
ation of lenity, though working in darkness and in chaos, in 
the midst of all this unnatural and turbid combination: I 
should hope it might produce order and beauty in the end. 
Let us, Sir, embrace some system or other before we end 
this session. Do you mean to tax America, and to draw 
a productive revenue from thence? If you do, speak out: 
name, fix, ascertain this revenue; settle its quantity; de- 
fine its objects; provide for its collection; and then fight, 
when you have something to fight for. If you murder, 
rob; if you kill, take possession; and do not appear in the 
character of madmen as well as assassins, violent, vindictive, 
bloody, and tyrannical, without an object. But may better 
counsels guide you! . 
Again and again, revert to your old  principles,—seek 
peace and ensue it,--leave America, if she has taxable 
matter in her, to tax herself. I am not here going into 
the distinctions of rights, nor attempting to mark their 
boundaries. I do not enter into these metaphysical dis- 
tinctions. I hate the very sound of them. Leave the 
Americans as they anciently stood, and these distinctions, 
born of our unhappy contest, will die along with it. They 
and we, and their and our ancestors, have been happy 
under that system. Let the memory of all actions in con- 
tradiction to that good old mode, on both sides, be extin- 
guished forever. Be content to bind America by laws of 


56 BURKE 


trade: you have always done it. Let this be your reason 
for binding their trade. Do not burden them. by taxes: 
you were not used to do so from the beginning. Let this 
be your reason for not taxing. These are the arguments 
of states and kingdoms. Leave the rest to the schools; for 
there only they may be discussed with safety. But if, in- 
temperately, unwisely, fatally, you sophisticate and poison 
the very source of government, by urging subtle deductions, 
and consequences odious to those you govern, from the un- 
limited and illimitable nature of supreme sovereignty, you 
will teach them by these means to call that sovereignty 
itself in question. When you drive him hard, the boar will 
surely turn upon the hunters. If that sovereignty and their 
freedom cannot be reconciled, which will they take? They 
will cast your sovereignty in your face. Nobody will be 
argued into slavery. Sir, let the gentlemen on the other 
side call forth all their ability; let the best of them get up 
and tell me what one character of liberty the Americans 
have, and what one brand of slavery they are free from, if 
they are bound in their property and industry by all the 
restraints you can imagine on commerce, and at the same 
time are made pack-horses of every tax you choose to 
impose, without the least share in granting them. When 
they bear the burdens of unlimited monopoly, will you 
bring them to bear the burdens of unlimited revenue too ? 
The Englishman in America will feel that this is slavery: 
that it is legal slavery will be no compensation either to his 
feelings or his understanding. 

A noble lord,!* who spoke some time ago, is full of the fire 
of ingenuous youth; and when he has modeled the ideas of 
a lively imagination by further experience, he will be an or- 
nament to his country in either House. He has said that 
the Americans are our children, and how can they revolt 
against their parent? He says, that, if they are not free in 
their present state, England is not free; because Manchester, 
and other considerable places, are not represented. So, then, 
because some towns in England are not represented, America 


AMERICAN TAXATION 57 


is to have no representative at all. They are “ our chil- 
dren’’; but when children ask for bread, we are not to give 
astone. Is it because the natural resistance of things, and 
the various mutations of time, hinders our government, or 
any scheme of government, from being any more than a sort 
of approximation to the right, is it therefore that the colonies 
are to recede from it infinitely? When this child of ours 
wishes to assimilate to its parent, and to reflect with a true 
filial resemblance the beauteous countenance of British 
liberty, are we to turn to them the shameful parts of our 
constitution? are we to give them our weakness for their 
strength, our opprobrium for their glory, and the slough of 
slavery, which we are not able to work off, to serve them for 
their freedom? 

If this be the case, ask yourselves this question: Will 
they be content in such a state of slavery? If not, look to 
the consequences. Reflect how you are to govern a people 
who think they ought to be free, and think they are not. 
Your scheme yields no revenue ; it yields nothing but dis- 
content, disorder, disobedience: and such is the state of 
America, that, after wading up to your eyes in blood, you 
could only end just where you begun,—that is, to tax where 


no revenue is to be found, to——My voice fails me: my in- 
clination, indeed, carries me no further; all is confusion 
beyond it. 


Well, Sir, I have recovered a little, and before I sit down 
I must say something to another point with which gentle- 
men urge us. What is to become of the Declaratory Act, 
asserting the entireness of British legislative authority, if we 
abandon the practise of taxation ? 

For my part, I look upon the rights stated in that act ex- 
actly in the manner in which I viewed them on its very first 
proposition, and which I have often taken the liberty, with 
great humility, to lay before you. I look, I say, on the im- 
perial rights of Great Britain, and the privileges which the 
colonists ought to enjoy under these rights, to be just the 
most reconcilable things in the world. The Parliament of 


58 BURKE 


Great Britain sits at the head of her extensive empire in two 
capacities. Oneas the local legislature of this island, provid- 
ing for all things at home, immediately, and by no other in- 
strument than the executive power. The other, and I think 
her nobler capacity, is what I call her imperial character ; in 
which, as fromthe throne of heaven, she superintends all the 
several inferior legislatures, and guides and controls them all 
without annihilating any. As allthese provincial legislatures 
are only coédrdinate toeach other, they ought all to be sub- 
ordinate to her; else they can neither preserve mutual 
peace, nor hope for mutual justice, nor effectually afford 
mutual assistance. It is necessary to coerce the negligent, 
to restrain the violent, and to aid the weak and deficient, 
by the overruling plenitude of her power. She is never 
to intrude into the place of the others, whilst they are 
equal to the common ends of their institution. But in order 
to enable Parliament to answer all these ends of provident 
and beneficent superintendence, her powers must be bound- 
less. The gentlemen who think the powers of Parliament 
limited may please themselves to talk of requisitions. But 
suppose the requisitions are not obeyed? What! shall 
there be no reserved power in the empire, to supply a defi- 
ciency which may weaken, divide, and dissipate the whole? 
We are engaged in war,—the Secretary of State calls upon the 
colonies to contribute,—some would do it, I think most 
would cheerfully furnish whatever is demanded,—one or two, 
suppose, hang back, and, easing themselves, let the stress of 
the draft lie on the others,—surely it is proper that some 
authority might legally say, “Tax yourselves for the common 
supply, or Parliament will doit for you.” This backwardness 
was, as I am told, actually the case of Pennsylvania for some 
short time towards the beginning of the last war, owing to 
some internal dissensions in the colony. But whether the 
fact were so or otherwise, the case is equally to be provided 
for by a competent sovereign power. But then this ought 
to be no ordinary power, nor ever used in the first instance. 
This is what I meant, when I have said, at various times, 


AMERICAN TAXATION 59 


that I consider the power of taxing in Parliament as an in- 
strument of empire, and not as a means of supply. 

Such, Sir, is my idea of the Constitution of the British 
Empire, as distinguished from the Constitution of Britain ; 
and on these grounds I think subordination and liberty may 
be sufficiently reconciled through the whole,—whether to 
serve a refining speculatist or a factious demagogue I know 
not, but enough surely for the ease and happiness of man. 

Sir, whilst we held this happy course, we drew more from 
the colonies than all the impotent violence of despotism 
ever could extort from them. We did this abundantly in 
the last war; it has never been once denied; and what 
reason have we to imagine that the colonies would'not have 
proceeded in supplying government as liberally, if you had 
not stepped in and hindered them from contributing, by 
interrupting the channel in which their liberality flowed with 
so strong a course,—by attempting to take, instead of being 
satisfied to receive? Sir William Temple says, that Holland 
has loaded itself with ten times the impositions which it 
revolted from Spain rather than submit to. He says true. 
Tyranny is a poor provider. It knows neither how to ac- 
cumulate nor how to extract. 

I charge, therefore, to this new and unfortunate system 
the loss not only of peace, of union, and of commerce, but 
even of revenue, which its friends are contending for. It is 
morally certain that we have lost at least a million of free 
grants since the peace. I think we have lost a great deal 
more ; and that those who look for a revenue from the prov- 
inces never could have pursued, even in that light, a course 
more directly repugnant to their purposes. 

Now, Sir, I trust I have shown, first on that narrow 
ground which the honourabe gentleman measured, that you 
are like to lose nothing by complying with the motion, ex- 
cept what you have lost already. I have shown afterwards, 
that in time of peace you flourished in commerce, and, when 
war required it, had sufficient aid from the colonies, while 
you pursued your ancient policy ; that you threw everything 


60 BURKE 


into confusion, when you made the Stamp Act; and that 
you restored everything to peace and order, when you re- 
pealed it. I have shown that the revival of the system of 
taxation has produced the very worst effects; and that the 
partial repeal has produced, not partial good, but universal 
evil. Let these considerations, founded on facts, not one of 
which can be denied, bring us back to our reason by the road 
of our experience. 

I can not, as I have said, answer for mixed measures: but 
surely this mixture of lenity would give the whole a better 
chance of success. When you once regain confidence, the 
way will be clear before you. Then you may enforce the 
Act of Navigation, when it ought to be enforced. You will 
yourselves open it, where it ought still further to be opened. 
Proceed in what you do, whatever you do, from policy, and not 
fromrancour. Letusact like men, let usact like statesmen. 
Let us hold some sort of consistent conduct. It is agreed 
that a revenue is not to be had in America. If we lose the 
profit, let us get rid of the odium. 

On this business of America, I confess I am serious, even 
to sadness. JI have had but one opinion concerning it, since 
I sat, and before I sat, in Parliament. The noble lord ® 
will, as usual, probably, attribute the part taken by me and 
my friends in this business to a desire of getting his places. 
Let him enjoy this happy and originalidea. If I deprived him 
of it, I should take away most of his wit, and all his argu- 
ment. But I had rather bear the brunt of all his wit, and 
indeed blows much heavier, than stand answerable to God 
for embracing a system that tends to the destruction of some 
of the very best and fairest of His works. But I know the 
map of England as well as the noble lord, or as any other 
person; and I know that the way I take is not the road to 
preferment. My excellent and honourable friend under me on 
the floor #* has trod that road with great toil for upwards of 
twenty years together. He is not yet arrived at the noble 
lord’s destination. However, the tracks of my worthy 
friend are those I have ever wished to follow; because I 


AMERICAN TAXATION robe 


know they lead to honour. Long may we tread the same 
road together, whoever may accompany us, or whoever may 
laugh at us on our journey! I honestly and solemnly de- 
clare I have in all seasons adhered to the system of 1766 for 
no other reason than that I think it laid deep in your truest 
interests,—and that, by limiting the exercise, it fixes on the 
firmest foundations a real, consistent, well-grounded author- 
ity in Parliament. Until you come back to that system, 
there will be no peace for England. 


NOTES 


1. Charles Wolfran Cornwall, Esq. 

2. Lord North, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. 

3. Lord Hillsborough’s Circular Letter to the Governors of the Colonies, con- 
cerning the repeal of some of the duties laid in the Act of 1767. 

4. A material point is omitted by Mr. Burke in this speech, viz., the manner in 
which the continent received this royal assurance. The assembly of Virginia, 
in their address in answer to Lord Botetourt’s speech, express themselves thus : 
—“ We will not suffer our present hopes, arising from the pleasing prospect 
your Lordship hath so kindly opened and displayed to us, to be dashed by the 
bitter reflection that any future administration will entertain a wish to depart 
from that plan which affords the surest and most permanent foundation of pub- 
lic tranquillity and happiness. No, my Lord, we are sure our most gracious 
sovereign, under whatever changes may happen in his confidential servants, 
will remain immutable in the ways of truth and justice, and that heis incapable 
of deceiving his faithful subjects ; and we esteem your Lordship’s information 
not only as warranted, but even sanctified by the royal word.” 

5. Lord North. 

6. Mr. Dowdeswell. 

7,8, 9, 10, General Conway. 

11. Supposed to allude to the Right Honourable Lord North, and George 
Cooke, Esq., who were made joint paymasters in the summer of 1766, on the 
removal of the Rockingham administration. 

12. Resolutions in May, 1770. 

‘13. Mr. Fuller. 

14. Lord Carmarthen. 

15. Lord North. 

16. Mr. Dowdeswell. 


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TO THE ELECTORS OF BRISTOL, ON BEING 
ELECTED A REPRESENTATIVE IN 
PARLIAMENT FOR THAT CITY 


(Delivered on Thursday, November 3, 1774.) 


ENTLEMEN,—I can not avoid sympathizing strongly 

with the feelings of the gentleman who has received 
the same honour that you have conferredon me. If he, who 
was bred and passed his whole life amongst you,—if he, who, 
through the easy gradations of acquaintance, friendship, and 
esteem, has obtained the honour which seems of itself, natu- 
rally and almost insensibly, to meet with those who, by the 
even tenor of pleasing manners and social virtues, slide into 
the love and confidence of their fellow-citizens,—if he can 
not speak but with great emotion on this subject, surrounded 
as he is on all sides with his old friends,—you will have 
the goodness to excuse me, if my real, unaffected embarrass- 
ment prevents me from expressing my gratitude to you as I 
ought. 

I was brought hither under the disadvantage of being un- 
known, even by sight, to any of you. No previous canvass 
was made for me. I was put in nomination after the poll 
was opened. I did not appear until it was far advanced. 
If, under all these accumulated disadvantages, your good 
opinion has carried me to this happy point of success, you 
will pardon me, if I can only say to you collectively, as I 
said to you individually, simply and plainly, I thank you,— 
I am obliged to you,—I am not insensible of your kindness, 

This is all that I am able to say for the inestimable favour 
you have conferred upon me. ButI can not be satisfied with- 
out saying a little more in ries of the right you have 

3 


64 BURKE 


to confer such a favour. The person that appeared here as 
counsel for the candidate who so long and so earnestly solic- 
ited your votes thinks proper to deny that a very great part 
of you have any votes to give. He fixes a standard period 
of time in his own imagination, (not what the law defines, 
but merely what the convenience of his client suggests,) by 
which he would cut off at one stroke all those freedoms 
which are the dearest privileges of your corporation,—which 
the Common Law authorizes,—which your magistrates are 
compelled to grant,—which come duly authenticated into 
this court,—and are saved in the clearest words, and with 
the most religious care and tenderness, in that very act of 
Parliament which was made to regulate the elections by 
freemen, and to prevent all possible abuses in making them. 

I do not intend to argue the matter here. My learned 
counsel has supported your cause with his usual ability ; the 
worthy sheriffs have acted with their usual equity; and I 
have no doubt that the same equity which dictates the re- 
turn will guide the final determination. Ihad the honour, in 
conjunction with many far wiser men, to contribute a very 
small assistance, but, however, some assistance, to the form- 
ing the judicature which is to try such questions, It would 
be unnatural in me to doubt the justice of that court, in 
the trial of my own cause, to which I have been so active to 
give jurisdiction over every other. 

I assure the worthy freemen, and this corporation, that, if 
the gentleman perseveres in the intentions which his present 
warmth dictates to him, I will attend their cause with dili- 
gence, and I hope with effect. For, if I know anything of 
myself, it is not my own interest in it, but my full convic- 
tion, that induces me to tell you, I think there is not a 
shadow of doubt in the case. 

I do not imagine that you find me rash in declaring my- 
self, or very forward in troubling you. From the beginning 
to the end of the election, 1 have kept silence in all matters 
of discussion. I have never asked a question of a voter on 
the other side, or supported a doubtful vote on my own. I| 


TO THE ELECTORS OF BRISTOL 65 


respected the abilities of my managers; I relied on the 
candour of the court. I think the worthy sheriffs will bear 
me witness that I have never once made an attempt to im- 
pose upon their reason, to surprise their justice, or to ruffle 
their temper.’ I stood on the hustings (except when I gave 
my thanks to those who favoured me with their votes) less 
like a candidate than an unconcerned spectator of a public 
proceeding. But here the face of things is altered. Here is 
an attempt for a general massacre of suffrages,—an attempt, 
by a promiscuous carnage of friends and foes, to extermi- 
nate above two thousand votes, including seven hundred 
polled for the gentleman himself who now complains, and 
who would destroy the friends whom he has obtained, only 
because hecannot obtain as many of them as he wishes. 

How he will be permitted, in another place, to stultify and 
disable himself, and to plead against his own acts, is another 
question. The law will decide it. I shall only speak of it 
as it concerns the propriety of public conduct in this city, 
I do not pretend to lay down rules of decorum for other 
gentlemen. They are best judges of the mode of proceed- 
ing that will recommend them to the favour of their fellow- 
citizens. But I confess I should look rather awkward, if I 
had been the very first to produce the new copies of free- 
dom,—if I had persisted in producing them to the last,—if I 
had ransacked, with the most unremitting industry and the 
most penetrating research, the remotest corners of the king- 
dom to discover them,—if I were then, all at once, to turn 
short, and declare that I had been sporting all this while 
with the right of election, and that I had been drawing out 
a poll, upon no sort of rational grounds, which disturbed the 
peace of my fellow-citizens for a month together ;—I really, 
for my part, should appear awkward under such circum- 
stances. 

It would be still more awkward in me, if I were gravely to 
look the sheriffs in the face, and to tell them they were not 
to determine my cause on my own principles, nor to make 


the return upon those votes upon which I had rested my 
5 


66 BURKE 


election. Such would be my appearance to the court and 
magistrates. Sey, 

But how should I appear to the voters themselves? If I 
had gone round to the citizens entitled to freedom, and 
squeezed them by the hand,—“ Sir, 1 humbly beg your vote, 
—TI shall be eternally thankful,—may I hope for the honour 
of your support ? —Well !—come,—we shall see you at 
the Council-House.”—If I were then to deliver them to my 
managers, pack them into tallies, vote them off in court, and 
when I heard from the bar,—“ Such a one only! and such 
a one forever !—he’s my man !””—“ Thank you, good Sir,— 
Hah! my worthy friend! thank you kindly,—that’s an 
honest fellow,—how is your good family ?’’—Whilst these 
words were hardly out of my mouth, if I should have 
wheeled round at once, and told them,—‘‘ Get you gone, 
you pack of worthless fellows! you have no votes,—you are 
usurpers! you are intruders on the rights of real freemen! 
I will have nothing to do with you! you ought never to 
have been produced at this election, and the sheriffs ought 
not to have admitted you to poll!”’ 

Gentlemen, I should make a strange figure, if my conduct 
had been of this sort. I am not so old an acquaintance of 
yours as the worthy gentleman. Indeed, I could not have 
ventured on such kind of freedoms with you. But I am 
bound, and I will endeavour, to have justice done to the 
rights of freemen,—even though I should at the same time 
be obliged to vindicate the former! part of my antagonist’s 
conduct against his own present inclinations. 

I owe myself, in all things, to all the freemen of this city. 
My particular friends have a demand on me that I should 
not deceive their expectations. Never was cause or man 
supported with more constancy, more activity, more spirit. 
I have been supported with a zeal, indeed, and heartiness in 
my friends, which (if their object had been at all propor- 
tioned to their endeavours) could never be sufficiently com- 
mended. They supported me upon the most liberal princi- 
ples. They wished that the members for Bristol should be 


TO THE ELECTORS OF BRISTOL 67 


chosen for the city, and for their country at large, and not 
for themselves. 

So far they are not disappointed. If I possess nothing 
else, I am sure I possess the temper that is fit for your serv- 
ice. I know nothing of Bristol, but by the favours I have 
received, and the virtues I have seen exerted in it. 

I shall ever retain, what I now feel, the most perfect and 
grateful attachment to my friends,—and I have no enmities, 
no resentments. I never can consider fidelity to engage- 
ments and constancy in friendships but with the highest ap- 
probation, even when those noble qualities are employed 
against my own pretensions. The gentleman who is not so 
fortunate as I have been in this contest enjoys, in this res- 
pect, a consolation full of honour both to himself and to 
his friends. They have certainly left nothing undone for his 
service. : 

As for the trifling petulance which the rage of party stirs 
up in little minds, though it should show itself even in 
this court, it has not made the slightest impression on me. 
The highest flight of such clamorous birds is winged in an 
inferior region of the air. We hear them, and we look upon 
them, just as you, Gentlemen, when you enjoy the serene 
air on your lofty rocks, look down upon the gulls that skim 
the mud of your river, when it is exhausted of its tide. 

I am sorry I can not conclude without saying a word ona 
topic touched upon by my worthy colleague. I wish that 
topic had been passed by ata time when I have so little 
leisure to discuss it. But since he has thought proper to 
throw it out, I owe you a clear explanation of my poor 
sentiments on that subject. 

He tells you that “the topic of instructions has occa- 
sioned much altercation and uneasiness in this city”’; and 
he expresses himself (if I understand him rightly) in favour 
of the coercive authority of such instructions. 

Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and 
glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the 
closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communi- 


68 BURKE 


cation with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have 
great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their 
business unremitted attention. Itis his duty to sacrifice his 
repose, his pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs,—and above 
all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. 

But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgment, his en- 
lightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to 
any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not 
derive from your pleasure,—no, nor from the law and the 
Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the 
abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representa- 
tive owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and 
he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your 
opinion. 

My worthy colleague says, his will ought to be subservient 
to yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent. If govern- 
ment were a matter of will upon any side, yours, without 
question, ought to be superior. But government and legis- 
lation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of 
inclination ; and what sort of reason is that in which the 
determination precedes the discussion, in which one set of 
men deliberate and another decide, and where those who 
form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant 
from those who hear the arguments? 

To deliver an opinion is the right of all men; that of con- 
stituents is a weighty and respectable opinion, which a repre- 
sentative ought always to rejoice to hear, and which he 
ought always most seriously to consider. But authoritative 
instructions, mandates issued, which the member is bound 
blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for, 
though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment 
and conscience,—these are things utterly unknown to the 
laws of this land, and which arise from a fundamental mis- 
take of the whole order and tenor of our Constitution. 

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from differ- 
ent and hostile interests, which interests each must main- 
tain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and 


TO THE ELECTORS OF BRISTOL 69 


advocates ; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one 
nation, with one interest, that of the whole—where not local 
purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the gen- 
eral good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. 
You choose a member, indeed; but when you have chosen 
him, he is not member of Bristol, but he is a member of 
Parliament. If the local constituent should have an interest 
or should form an hasty opinion evidently opposite to the 
real good of the rest of the community, the member for that 
place ought to be as far as any other from any endeavour to 
give it effect.- I beg pardon for saying so much on this sub- 
ject; I have been unwillingly drawn into it; but I shall ever 
use a respectful frankness of communication with you. 
Your faithful friend, your devoted servant, I shall be to the 
end of my life: a flatterer you do not wish for. On this 
point of instructions, however, I think it scarcely possible 
we ever can have any sort of difference. Perhaps I may 
give you too much, rather than too little, trouble. 

From the first hour I was encouraged to court your favour, 
to this happy day of obtaining it, I have never promised 
you anything but humble and persevering endeavourstodo my 
duty. The weight of that duty, I confess, makes me tremble; 
and whoever well considers what it is, of all things in the 
world, will fly from what has the least likeness to a positive 
and precipitate engagement. To be a good member of 
Parliament is, let me tell you, no easy task,—especially at 
this time, when there is so strong a disposition to run into 
the perilous extremes of servile compliance or wild popu- 
larity. To unite circumspection with vigour is absolutely 
necessary, but it is extremely difficult. We are now mem- 
bers for a rich commercial city ; this city, however, is but a 
part of a rich commercial nation, the interests of which are 
various, multiform, and intricate. Weare members for that 
great nation, which, however, is itself but a part of a great 
empire, extended by our virtue and our fortune to the 
farthest limits of the East and of the West. All these wide- 
spread interests must be considered,—must be compared,— 


70 BURKE 


must be reconciled, if possible. We are members for a free 
country; and surely we all know that the machine of a free 
constitution is no simple thing, but as intricate and as deli- 
cate as it is valuable. We are members in a great and 
ancient monarchy; and we must preserve religiously the 
true, legal rights of the sovereign, which form the keystone 
that binds together the noble and well-constructed arch of 
our empire and our Constitution. A constitution made up 
of balanced powers must ever be a critical thing. As such I 
mean to touch that part of it which comes within my reach. 
I know my inability, and I wish for support from every 
quarter. In particular I shall aim at the friendship, and 
shall cultivate the best correspondence, of the worthy col- 
league you have given me. | 

I trouble you no farther than once more to thank you all: 
you, Gentlemen, for your favours; the candidates, for their 
temperate and polite behaviour; and the sheriffs, for a con- 
duct which may give a model for all who are in public sta- 


tions. 
NOTE 


1, Mr. Brickdale opened his poll, it seems, with a tally of those very kind of 
freemen, and voted many hundreds of them. 


RESOLUTIONS FOR CONCILIATION WITH 
THE AMERICAN COLONIES 


(Delivered in the House of Commons, March 22, 1775.) 


HOPE, Sir, that notwithstanding the austerity of the 
Chair, your good-nature will incline you to some degree 
of indulgence towards human frailty. You will not think it 
unnatural, that those who have an object depending, which 
strongly engages their hopes and fears, should be somewhat 
inclined to superstition. As I came into the house, full of 
anxiety about the event of my motion, I found, to my in- 
finite surprise, that the grand penal bill by which we had 
passed sentence on the trade and sustenance of America is 
to be returned to us from the other House.! I do confess, 
I could not help looking on this event as a fortunate omen. 
I look upon it as a-sort of Providential favour, by which we 
are put once more in possession of our deliberative capacity, 
upon a business so very questionable in its nature, so very 
uncertain in its issue. By the return of this bill, which 
seemed to have taken its flight forever, we are at this very 
instant nearly as free to choose a plan for our American 
government as we were on the first day of the session. If, 
Sir, we incline to the side of conciliation, we are not at all 
embarrassed (unless we please to make ourselves so) by any 
incongruous mixture of coercion and restraint. We are 
therefore called upon, as it were by a superior warning 
voice, again to attend to America,—to attend to the whole of 
it together,—and to review the subject with an unusual 
degree of care and calmness. 
Surely it is an awful subject,—or there is none so on this 


side of the grave. When I first had the honour of aseat in 
71 


72 BURKE 


this House, the affairs of that continent pressed themselves 
upon us as the most important and most delicate object of 
Parliamentary attention. My little share in this great delib- 
beration oppressed me. I found myself a partaker in a very 
high trust; and having no sort of reason to rely on the 
strength of my natural abilities for the proper execution of 
that trust, I was obliged to take more than common pains 
to instruct myself in everything which relates to our colonies. 
I was not less under the necessity of forming some fixed 
ideas concerning the general policy of the British empire. 
Something of this sort seemed to be indispensable, in order, 
amidst so vast a fluctuation of passions and opinions, to con- 
center my thoughts, to ballast my conduct, to preserve me 
from being blown about by every wind of fashionable doc- 
trine. I really did not think it safe or manly to have fresh 
principles to seek upon every fresh mail which should arrive 
from America. } 

At that period I had the fortune to find myself in perfect 
concurrence with a large majority in this House. Bowing 
under that high authority, and penetrated with the sharpness 
and strength of that early impression, I have continued ever 
since, without the least deviation, in my original sentiments. 
Whether this be owing to an obstinate perseverance in error, 
or to a religious adherence to what appears to me truth and 
reason, it is in your equity to judge. 

Sir, Parliament, having an enlarged view of objects, made, 
during this interval, more frequent changes in their senti- 
ments and their conduct than could be justified in a particular 
person upon the contracted scale of private information. 
But though I do not hazard anything approaching to a cen- 
sure on the motives of former Parliaments to all those alter- 
ations, one fact is undoubted,—that under them the state of 
America has been kept in continual agitation. Everything 
administered as remedy to the public complaint, if it did not 
produce, was at least followed by, an heightening of the dis- 
temper, until, by a variety of experiments, that important 
country has been brought into her present situation,— 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 73 


a situation which I will not miscall, which I dare not name, 
which I scarcely know how to comprehend in the terms of 
any description. 

In this posture, Sir, things stood at the beginning of the 
session, About that time, a worthy member,? of great 
Parliamentary experience, who in the year 1766 filled the 
chair of the American Committee with much ability, took 
me aside, and, lamenting the present aspect of our politics, 
told me things were come to such a pass that our former 
methods of proceeding in the House would be no longer 
tolerated,—that the public tribunal (never too indulgent to 
a long and unsuccessful opposition) would now scrutinize 
our conduct with unusual severity,—that the very vicissitudes 
and shiftings of ministerial measures, instead of convict- 
ing their authors of inconstancy and want of system, would 
be taken as an occasion of charging us with a predetermined 
discontent which nothing could satisfy, whilst we accused 
every measure of vigour ascruel and every proposal of lenity 
as weak and irresolute. The public, he said, would not have 
patience to see us play the game out with our adversaries ; 
we must produce our hand : it would be expected that those. 
who for many years had been active in such affairs should 
show that they had formed some clear and decided idea of 
the principles of colony government, and were capable of 
drawing out something like a platform of the ground which 
might be laid for future and permanent tranquillity. 

I felt the truth of what my honourable friend represented ; 
but I felt my situation, too. His application might have 
been made with far greater propriety to many other gentle- 
men. Noman was, indeed, ever better disposed, or worse 
qualified, for such an undertaking, than myself. Though I 
gave so far into his opinion, that I immediately threw my 
thoughts into a sort of Parliamentary form, I was by no 
means equally ready to produce them. It generally argues 
some degree of natural impotence of mind, or some want of 
knowledge of the world, to hazard plans of government, ex- 
cept from a seat of authority. Propositions are made, not 


74 BURKE 


only ineffectually, but somewhat disreputably, when the 
minds of men are not properly disposed for their reception ; 
and for my part, lam not ambitious of ridicule, not abso- 
lutely a candidate for disgrace.: | 

Besides, Sir, to speak the plain truth, I have in general no 
very exalted opinion of the virtue of paper government, nor 
of any politics in which the plan is to be wholly separated 
from the execution. But when I saw that anger and vio- 
lence prevailed every day more and more, and that things 
were hastening towards an incurable alienation of our col- 
onies, I confess my caution gave way. I felt this as one of 
those few moments in which decorum yields to a higher 
duty. Public calamity is a mighty leveler ; and there are 
occasions when any, even the slightest, chance of doing 
good must be laid hold on, even by the most inconsiderable 
person. 

To restore order and repose to an empire so great and so 
distracted as ours is, merely in the attempt, an undertaking 
that would ennoble the flights of the highest genius, and 
obtain pardon for the efforts of the meanest understanding. 
Struggling a good while with these thoughts, by degrees I 
felt myself more firm. I derived, at length, some confi- 
dence from what in other circumstances usually produces 
timidity. I grew less anxious, even from the idea of my 
own insignificance. For, judging of what you are by what 
you ought to be, I persuaded myself that you would not re- 
ject a reasonable proposition because it had nothing but its 
reason to recommend it. On the other hand, being totally 
destitute of all shadow of influence, natural or adventitious, 
I was very sure, that, if my proposition were futile or dan- 
gerous, if it were weakly conceived or improperly timed, 
there was nothing exterior to it of power to awe, dazzle, or 
delude you. You will see it just as it is, and you will treat 
it just as it deserves. 

The proposition is peace. Not peace through the medium 
of war; not peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of in- 
tricate and endless negotiations; not peace to arise out of 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 75 


universal discord, fomented from principle, in all parts of 
the empire; not peace to depend on the juridical determina- 
tion of perplexing questions, or the precise marking the 
shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple 
peace, sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. - 
It is peace sought in the spirit of peace, and laid in principles 
purely pacific. I propose, by removing the ground of the 
difference and by restoring the former unsuspecting confi- 
dence of the colonies in the mother country, to give perma- 
nent satisfaction to your people,—and (far from a scheme of 
ruling by discord) to reconcile them to each other in the 
same act and by the bond of the very same interest which 
reconciles them to British government. 

My idea is nothing more. Refined policy ever has been 
the parent of confusion,—and ever will be so, as long as the 
world endures. Plain good intention, which is as easily dis- 
covered at the first view as fraud is surely detected at last, 
is, let me say, of no mean force in the government of man- 
kind. Genuine simplicity of heart is a healing and cement- 
ing principle. My plan, therefore, being formed upon the 
most simple grounds imaginable, may disappoint some 
people, when they hear it. It has nothing to recommend it 
to the pruriency of curious ears. There is nothing at all 
new and captivating in it. It has nothing of the splendour 
of the project which has been lately laid upon your table by 
the noble lord in the blue ribbon. It does not propose to 
fill your lobby with squabbling colony agents, who will re- 
quire the interposition of your mace at every instant to keep 
the peace amongst them. It does not institute a magnifi- 
cent auction of finance, where captivated provinces come to 
general ransom by bidding against each other, until you 
knock down the hammer, and determine a proportion of 
payments beyond all the powers of algebra to equalize and 
settle. 7 

The plan which I shall presume to suggest derives, how- 
ever, one great advantage from the proposition and registry 
of that noble lord’s project. The idea of conciliation is 


76 BURKE 


admissible. First, the House, in accepting the resolution 
moved by the noble lord, has admitted, notwithstanding 
the menacing front of our address, notwithstanding our heavy 
bill of pains and penalties, that we do not think ourselves 
precluded from all ideas of free grace and bounty. | 

The House has gone farther: it has declared conciliation 
admissible previous to any submission on the part of America. 
It has even shot a good deal beyond that mark, and has ad- 
mitted that the complaints of our former mode of exerting the 
right of taxation were not wholly unfounded. That right thus 
exerted is allowed to have had something reprehensible in 
it,—something unwise, or something grievous; since, in the 
midst of our heat and resentment, we, of ourselves, have 
proposed a capital alteration, and, in order to get rid of 
what seemed so very exceptionable, have instituted a mode 
that is altogether new,—one that is, indeed, wholly alien 
from all the ancient methods and forms of Parliament. 

The principle of this proceeding is large enough for my 
purpose. The means proposed by the noble lord for carry- 
ing his ideas into execution, I think, indeed, are very in- 
differently suited to the end; and this I shall endeavour to 
show you before I sit down. But, for the present, I take my 
ground on the admitted principle. I mean to give peace. 
Peace implies reconciliation; and where there has been a 
material dispute, reconciliation does in a manner always im- 
ply concession on the one part or on the other. In this 
state of things I make no difficulty in affirming that the pro- 
posal ought to originate from us. Great and acknowledged 
force is not impaired, either in effect or in opinion, by an 
unwillingness to exert itself. The superior power may offer 
peace with honour and with safety. Such an offer from such 
a power will be attributed to magnanimity. But the con- 
cessions of the weak are the concessions of fear. When sucha 
one is disarmed, he is wholly at the mercy of his superior; 
and he loses forever that time and those chances which, as 
they happen to all men, are the strength and resources ofall 
inferior power. 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 77 


The capital leading questions on which you must this day 
decide are these two: First, whether you ought to concede; 
and secondly, what your concession ought to be. On the 
first of these questions we have gained (as I have just taken 
the liberty of observing to you) some ground. But I am 
sensible that a good deal more is still to be done. Indeed, 
Sir, to enable us to determine both on the one and the other 
of these great questions with a firm and precise judgment, I 
think'it may be necessary to consider distinctly the true na- 
ture and the peculiar circumstances of the object which we 
have before us: because, after all our struggle, whether we will 
or not, we must govern America according to that nature 
and to those circumstances, and not according to our own 
imaginations, not according to abstract ideas of right, by no 
means according to mere general theories of government, 
the resort to which appears to me, in our present situation, 
no betterthan arrant trifling. I shall therefore endeavour, with 
your leave, to lay before you some of the most material of 
these circumstances in as full and as clear a manner as lam 
able to state them. 

The first thing that we have to consider with regard to 
the nature of the object is the number of people in the 
colonies. I have taken for some years a good deal of pains 
on that point. I can by no calculation justify myself in 
placing the number below two millions of inhabitants of our 
own European blood and colour,—besides at least 500,000 
others, who form no inconsiderable part of the strength and 
opulence of the whole. This, Sir, is, I believe, about the true 
number. There is no occasion to exaggerate, where plain 
. truth is of so much weight and importance. But whether I 
put the present numbers too high or too low isa matter of 
little moment. Such is the strength with which population 
shoots in that part of the world, that, state the numbers as 
high as we will, whilst the dispute continues, the exagger- 
ation ends. Whilst we are discussing any given magnitude, 
they are grown to it. Whilst we spend our time in deliber- 
ating on the mode of governing two millions, we shall find 


78 BURKE 


we have millions more to manage. Your children do nof 
grow faster from infancy to manhood than they spread from 
families to communities, and from villages to nations. 

I put this consideration of the present and the growing 
numbers in the front of our deliberation, because, Sir, this 
consideration will make it evident to a blunter discernment 
than yours, that no partial, narrow, contracted, pinched, 
occasional system will be at all suitable to such an object. 
It will show you that it is not to be considered as one of 
those minima which are out of the eye and consideration of 
the law,—not a paltry excrescence of the state,—not a mean 
dependant, who may be neglected with little damage and 
provoked with little danger. It will prove that some degree 
of care and caution is required in the handling of such an 
object ; it will show that you ought not, in reason, to trifle 
with so large a mass of the interests and feelings of the 
human race. You could at no time do so without guilt; and 
be assured you will not be able to do it long with impunity. 

But the population of this country, the great and growing 
population, though a very important consideration, will lose 
much of its weight, if not combined with other circum- 
stances. The commerce of your colonies is out of all pro- 
portion beyond the numbers of the people. This ground 
of their commerce, indeed, has been trod some days ago, 
and with great ability, by a distinguished person, * at your 
bar. This gentleman, after thirty-five years,—it is so long 
since he first appeared at the same place to plead for the 
commerce of Great Britain,—has come again before you to 
plead the same cause, without any other effect of time than 
that to the fire of imagination and extent of erudition, which 
even then marked him as one of the first literary characters: 
of his age, he has added a consummate knowledge in the 
commercial interest of his country, formed by a long course 
of enlightened and discriminating experience. 

Sir, I should be inexcusable in coming after such a person 
with any detail, if a great part of the members who now fill 
the House had not the misfortune to be absent when he 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 79. 


appeared at your bar. Besides, Sir, I propose to take the 
matter at periods of time somewhat different from his. There 
is, if I mistake not, a point of view from whence, if you will 
look at this subject, it is impossible that it should not make 
an impression upon you. 

I have in my hand two accounts: one a comparative state 
of the export trade of England to its colonies, as it stood in 
the year 1704, and as it stood in the year 1772 ; the othera state 
of the export trade of this country to its colonies alone, as it 
stood in 1772, compared with the whole trade of England 
to all parts of the world (the colonies included) in the year 
1704. They are from good vouchers: the latter period from 
the accounts on your table; the earlier from an original 
manuscript of Davenant, who first established the Inspector- 
General’s office, which has been ever since his time so abun- 
_ dant a source of Parliamentary information. 

The export trade to the colonies consists of three great 
branches: the African, which, terminating almost wholly in 
the colonies, must be put to the account of their commerce; 
the West Indian; and the North American. All these are 
so interwoven, that the attempt to separate them would tear 
to pieces the contexture of the whole, and, if not entirely 
destroy, would very much depreciate, the value of all the 
parts. I therefore consider these three denominations to be, 
what in effect they are, one trade. 

The trade to the colonies, taken on the export side, at the 
beginning of this century, that is, in the year 1704, stood 
thus :— 


Exports to North America and the West 


ee reg ee le hig aa Ay Aa aCe 
sh" Ce a ec ne a IS ie 86,665 
& 569,930 


In the year 1772, which I take as a ‘middle year between 
the highest and lowest of those lately laid on your table, 
the account was as follows :— 


80 BURKE 


To North America and the West Indies... . £ 4,791,734 
To Africa vik Hn Ry Srabietiteas, wiki eds ayn 866,398 
To which if you add the export trade from 

Scotland, which had in 1704 no existence . . 364,000 


& 6,024,171 


From five hundred and odd thousand, it has grown to six 
millions. It has increased no less than twelvefold. This is 
the state of the colony trade, as compared with itself at these 
two periods, within this century ;—and this is matter for 
meditation. But this is not all. Examine my second ac- 
count. See how the export trade to the colonies alone in 
1772 stood in the other point of view, that is, as compared 
to the whole trade of England in 1704. 


The whole export trade of England in- 


cluding that to the colonies, in 1704 % 6,509,000 
Export to the colonies alone, in 1772. 6,024,000 
Difference) Foy 4 485,000 


The trade with America alone is now within less than 
500,000/. of being equal to what this great commercial 
nation, England, carried on at the beginning of this century 
with the whole world! If I had taken the largest year of 
those on your table, it would rather have exceeded. But, ‘dt 
will be said, is not this American trade an unnatural protu- 
berance, that has drawn the juices from the rest of the body? 
The reverse. It is the very food that has nourished every 
other part into its present magnitude. Our general trade 
has been greatly augmented, and augmented more or less in 
almost every part to which it ever extended, but with this 
material difference : that of the six millions which in the 
beginning of the century constituted the whole mass of our 
export commerce the colony trade was but one twelfth part ; 
it is now (as a part of sixteen millions) considerably more 
than a third of the whole. This is the relative proportion 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA Sf 


’ of the importance of the colonies at these two periods: and 
all reasoning concerning our mode of treating them must 
have this proportion as its basis, or it is a reasoning weak, 
rotten, and sophistical. 

Mr. Speaker, I can not prevail on myself to hurry over 
this great consideration. It is good for us to be here. We 
stand where we have an immense view of what is, and what 
is past. Clouds indeed, and darkness, rest upon the future. 
Let us, however, before we descend from this noble emi- 
nence, reflect that this growth of our national prosperity has 
happened within the short period of the life of man. It 
has happened within sixty-eight years. There are those 
alive whose memory might touch the two extremities. For 
instance, my Lord Bathurst might remember all the stages 
of the progress. He was in 1704 of an age at least to be 
made to comprehend such things. He was then old enough 
acta parentum jam legere, et que sit poterit cognoscere 
virtus. Suppose, Sir, that the angel of this auspicious youth, 
foreseeing the many virtues which made him one of the 
most amiable, as he is one of the most fortunate men of his 
age, had opened to him in vision, that, when, in the fourth 
generation, the third prince of the House of Brunswick had 
sat twelve years on the throne of that nation which (by the - 
happy issue of moderate and healing councils) was to be 
made Great Britain, he should see his son, Lord Chancellor 
of England, turn back the current of hereditary dignity to 
its fountain, and raise him to an higher rank of peerage, 
whilst he enriched the family with a new one,—if, amidst 
these bright and happy scenes of domestic honour and pros- 
perity, that angel should have drawn up the curtain, and 
unfolded the rising glories of his country, and whilst he was 
gazing with admiration on the then commercial grandeur 
of England, the genius should point out to him a little 
speck, scarce visible in the mass of the national interest, 
a small seminal principle rather than a formed body, and 
should tell him,—‘‘ Young man, there is America,—which 
at 7 day serves for little more than to amuse you with 


82 BURKE 


stories of savage men and uncouth manners, yet shall, before 
you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that 
commerce which now attracts the envy of the world. What- 
ever England has been growing to by a progressive in- 
crease of improvement, brought in by varieties of people, by 
succession of civilizing conquests and civilizing settlements 
in a series of seventeen hundred years, you shall see as much 
added to her by America in the course of a single life!” 
If this state of his country had been foretold to him, would 
it not require all the sanguine credulity of youth, and all 
the fervid glow of enthusiasm, to make him believe it? For- 
tunate man, he has lived to see it! Fortunate indeed, if he 
lives to see nothing that shall vary the prospect, and cloud 
the setting of his day! 

Excuse me, Sir, if, turning. from such thoughts, I resume 
this comparative view once more. You have seen it on a 
large scale ; look at it ona small one. I will point out to 
your attention a particular instance of it in the single prov- 
ince of Pennsylvania. In the year 1704 that province 
called for 11,459/. in value of your commodities, native and 
foreign. Thiswas the whole. What did it demand in 1772? 
Why, nearly fifty times as much; for in that year the export 
to Pennsylvania was 507,900/., ably equal to the cmon to 
all the colonies together in the first period. 

I choose, Sir, to enter into these minute and particular 
details ; because generalities, which in all other cases are apt to 
heighten and raise the subject, have here a tendency to sink 
it. When we speak of the commerce with our colonies, 
fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful, and imagina- 
tion cold and barren. 

So far, Sir, as to the importance of the object in the view 
_ of its commerce, as concerned in the exports from England. 
If I were to detail the imports, I could show how many 
enjoyments they procure which deceive the burden of life, 
how many materials which invigorate the springs of national 
industry and extend and animate every part of our foreign 
and domestic commerce. This would be a curious subject 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA $3 


indeed,—but I must prescribe bounds to myself in a matter 
so vast and various. | | 

I pass, therefore, to the colonies in another point of view 
—their agriculture. This they have prosecuted with sucha 
spirit, that, besides feeding plentifully their own growing 
multitude, their annual export of grain, comprehending rice, 
has some years ago exceeded a million in value. Of their 
last harvest I am persuaded, they will export much more. 
At the beginning of the century some of these colonies im- 
ported corn from the mother country. For some time past 
the Old World has been fed from the New. The scarcity 
which you have felt would have been a desolating famine, if 
this child of your old age, with a true filial piety, with a 
Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youthful 
exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent. 

As to the wealth which the colonies have drawn from the 
sea by their fisheries, you had all that matter fully opened at 
yourbar. You surely thought those acquisitions of value, for 
they seemed even to excite your envy; and yet the spirit , 
by which that enterprising employment has been exercised 
ought rather, in my opinion, to have raised your esteem and 
admiration. And pray, Sir, what in the world is equal to it ? 
Pass by the other parts, and look at the manner in which the 
people of New England have of late carried on the whale- 
fishery. Whilst we follow them among the tumbling 
_ mountains of ice,and behold them penetrating into the deepest 
_ frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay and Davis’s Straits, whilst 
we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear 
that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar 
cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the 
frozenserpent of the South. Falkland Island, which seemed 
too remote and romantic an object for the grasp of national 
ambition, is but a stage and resting-place in the progress of 
their victorious industry. Nor is the equinoctial heat more 
discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both 
the poles. We know, that, whilst some of them draw the line 
and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the 


84 BURKE 


longitude, and pursue their gigantic game along the coast’ of 
Brazil. No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries. No 
climate that is not witness to their toils. Neither the per- 
severance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the 
dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ever car- 
ried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the ex- 
tent to which it has been pushed by this recent people,—a 
people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not 
yet hardened into the bone of manhood. When I contem- 
plate these things,—when I know that the colonies in general 
owe little or nothing to any care of ours, and that they are 
‘not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of 
watchful and suspicious government, but that, through a 
wise and salutary neglect, a generous nature has been suf- 
fered to take her own way to perfection,—when I reflect up- 
on these effects, when I see how profitable they have been 
to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption 
in the wisdom of human contrivances melt and die away 
within me,—my rigour relents,—I pardon something to the 
Spirit of liberty. | 

I am sensible, Sir, that all which I have asserted in my 
detail is admitted in the gross, but that quite a different 
conclusion is drawn from it. America, gentlemen say, is a 
noble object,—it is an object well worth fighting for. 
Certainly it is, if fighting a people be the best way of gain- 
ing them. Gentlemen in this respect will be led to their 
choice of means by their complexions and their habits. 
Those who understand the military art will of course have 
some predilection for it. Those who wield the thunder of 
the state may have more confidence in the efficacy of arms. 
But I confess, possibly for want of this knowledge, my opin- 
ion is much more in favour of prudent management than of 
force,—considering force not as an odious, but a feeble in- 
strument, for preserving a people so numerous, so active, so 
growing, so spirited as this, in a profitable and subordinate 
connection with us. 

First, Sir, permit me to observe, that the use of force alone 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 85 


is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it 
does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a 
nation is not governed which is perpetually to be con- 
quered. | 

My next objection is its uncertainty. Terror is not al- 
ways the effect of force, and an armament is not a victory. 
If you do not succeed, you are without resource: for, cons 
ciliation failing, force remains; but, force failing, no further 
hope of reconciliation is left. Power and authority are 
sometimes bought by kindness; but they can never be 
begged as alms by an impoverished and defeated violence. | 

A further objection to force is, that you impair the object 
by your very endeavours to preserve it. The thing you 
fought for is not the thing which you recover, but depreciated, 
sunk, wasted, and consumed in the contest. Nothing less 
will content me than whole America. I do not choose to 
consume its strength along with our own; because in all parts 
it is the British strength that I consume. I do not choose 
to be caught by aforeign enemy at the end of this exhausting 
conflict, and still less in the midst of it. I may escape, but 
I can make no insurance against suchanevent. Let meadd, 
that I do not choose wholly to break the American spirit; 
because it is the spirit that has made the country. 

Lastly, we have no sort of experience in favour of force as 
an instrument in the rule of our colonies. Their growth and 
their utility has been owing to methods altogether different. 
Our ancient indulgence has been said to be pursued toa 
fault. It may beso; but we know, if feeling is evidence, 
that our fault was more tolerable than our attempt to mend 
it, and our sin far more salutary than our penitence. 

These, Sir, are my reasons for not entertaining that high 
opinion of untried force by which many gentlemen, for 
whose sentiments in other particulars I have great respect, 
seem to be so greatly captivated. But there is still behind 
a third consideration concerning this object, which serves to 
determine my opinion on the sort of policy which ought -to 
be pursued in the management of America, even more than 


86 BURKE 


its population and its commerce: I mean its temper and 
character. 

In this character of the Americans a love of freedom is 
the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes 
the whole: and as an ardent is always a jealous affection, 
your colonies become suspicious, restive, and untractable, 
whenever they see the least attempt to wrest from them by 
force, or shuffle from them by chicane, what they think the 
only advantage worth living for. This fierce spirit of liberty 
is stronger in the English colonies, probably, than in any 
other people of the earth, and this from a great variety of 
powerful causes; which, to understand the true temper 
of their minds, and the direction which this spirit takes, 
it will not be amiss to lay open somewhat more largely. 

First, the people of the colonies are descendants of English- 
men. England, Sir, is a nation which still, I hope, respects, 
and formerly adored, her freedom. The colonists emigrated 
from you when this part of your character was most pre- 
dominant; and they took this bias and direction the mo- 
ment they parted from your hands. They are therefore not 
only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English 
ideas and on English principles. Abstract liberty, like 
other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres 
in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to 
itself some favourite point, which by way of eminence be- 
comes the criterion of their happiness. It happened, you 
know, Sir, that the great contests for freedom in this coun- 
try were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question 
of taxing. Most of the contests in the ancient common- 
wealths turned primarily on the right of election of magis- 
trates, or on the balance among the several orders of the 
state. The question of money was not with them so imme- 
diate. But in England it was otherwise. On this point of 
taxes the ablest pens and most eloquent tongues have been 
exercised, the greatest spirits have acted and suffered. In 
order to give the fullest satisfaction concerning the impor- 
tance of this point, it was not only necessary for those who 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 87 


in argument defended the excellence of the English Consti- 
tution to insist on this privilege of granting money as a dry 
point of fact, and to prove that the right had been acknowl- 
edged in ancient parchments and blind usages to reside in a 
certain body called an House of Commons: they went much 
further: they attempted to prove, and they succeeded, that 
in theory it ought to be so, from the particular nature of a 
House of Commons, as an immediate representative of the 
people, whether the old records had delivered this oracle or 
not. They took infinite pains to inculcate, as a fundamen- 
tal principle, that in all monarchies the people must in 
effect themselves, mediately,or immediately, possess the power 
of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty could 
subsist. The colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, 
these ideasand principles. Their love of liberty, as with you, 
fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing. Liberty 
might be safe or might be endangered in twenty other par- 
ticulars without their being much pleased or alarmed. 
Here they felt its pulse; and as they found that beat, they 
thought themselves sick or sound. I do not say whether 
they were right or wrong in applying your general argu- 
ments to their own case. It is not easy, indeed, to make a 
monopoly of theorems and corollaries, The fact, is that they 
did thus apply those general arguments; and your mode of 
governing them, whether through lenity or indolence, 
through wisdom or mistake, confirmed them in the imagi- 
nation, that they, as well as you, had an interest in these 
common principles. 

They were further confirmed in this pleasing error by the 
form of their provincial legislative assemblies. Their govern- 
ments. are popular in an high degree: some are merely 
popular; in all, the popular representative is the most 
weighty; and this share of the people in their ordinary 
government never fails to inspire them with lofty senti- 
ments, and with a strong aversion from whatever tends to 
deprive them of their chief importance. 

If anything were wanting to this necessary operation of 


88 | | BURKE 


the form of government, religion would have given it a com- 
plete effect. Religion, always a principle of energy, in this 
new people is no way worn out or impaired ; and their mode 
of professing it is also one main cause of this free spirit. 
The people are Protestants, and of that kind which is the 
most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. 
This is a persuasion not only favourable to liberty, but built 
upon it. Ido not think, Sir, that the reason of this averse- 
ness in the dissenting churches from all that looks like ab- 
solute government is so much to be sought in their religious 
tenets as in their history. Every one knows that the Roman 
Catholic religion is at least coeval with most of the govern- 
ments where it. prevails, that it has generally gone hand in 
hand with them, and received great favour and every kind of 
support from authority. The Church of England, too, was 
formed from her cradle under the nursing care of regular 
government. But the dissenting interests have sprung up 
in direct opposition to all the ordinary powers of the world, 
and could justify that opposition only on a strong claim to 
natural liberty. Their very existence depended on the 
powerful and unremitted assertion of that claim. All Protes- 
tantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of dissent. 
But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is 
a refinement on the principle of resistance: it is the dissi- 
dence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant 
religion. This religion, under a variety of denominations 
agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of 
liberty, is predominant in most of the northern provinces, 
where the Church of England, notwithstanding its legal 
rights, is in reality no more than a sort of private sect, not 
composing, most probably, the tenth of the people. The 
colonists left England when this spirit was high, and in the 
emigrants was the highest of all; and even that stream 
of foreigners which has been constantly flowing into 
these colonies has, for the greatest part, been composed 
of dissenters from. the establishments of their several 
countries, and have brought with them a temper and 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 89 


character far from alien to that of the people with whom 
they mixed. | : 
Sir,I can perceive, by their manner, that some gentlemen 
object to the latitude of this description, because in the 
southern colonies the Church of England forms a large body, 
and has a regular establishment. It is certainly true. There 
is, however, a circumstance attending these colonies, which, 
in my opinion, fully counterbalances this difference, and 
makes the spirit of liberty still more high and haughty than 
in those to the northward. It is, that in Virginia and the 
Carolinas they have a vast multitude of slaves. Where this 
is the case in any part of the world, those who are free are 
by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom.  Free- 
dom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank 
and privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as in countries 
where it is a common blessing, and as broad and general as 
the air, may be united with much abject toil, with great 
misery, with all the exterior of servitude, liberty looks, 
amongst them, like something that is more noble and liberal. 
I do not mean, Sir, to commend the superior morality of 
this sentiment, which has at least as much pride as virtue in 
it; but I can notalter the nature of man. The fact is so; 
and these people of the southern colonies are much more 
strongly, and with an higher and more stubborn spirit, 
attached to liberty, than those to the northward. Such 
were all the ancient commonwealths; such were our Gothic 
ancestors; such in our days were the Poles; and such will 
be all masters of slaves, who are not slaves themselves. In 
such a people, the haughtiness of domination combines with 
the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible. 
Permit me, Sir, to add another circumstance in our col- 
onies, which contributes no mean part towards the growth 
and effect of this untractable spirit: I mean their education. 
In no country, perhaps, in the world is the law so general a 
study. The profession itself is numerous and powerful, and 
in most provinces it takes the lead. The greater number of 
the deputies sent to the Congress were lawyers, But all 


90 BURKE 


who read, and most do read, endeavour to obtain some 
smattering in that science. I have been told by an eminent 
bookseller, that in no branch of his business, after tracts of 
popular devotion, were so many books as those on the law 
exported to the plantations. The colonists have now fallen 
into the way of printing them for their own use. I hear 
that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone’s “ Com- 
mentaries’”’ in America as in England. General Gage marks 
out this disposition very particularly in a letter on your 
table. He states, that all the people in his government are 
lawyers, or smatterers in law,—and that in Boston they have 
been enabled, by successful chicane, wholly to evade many 
parts of one of your capital penal constitutions. The smart- 
ness of debate will say, that this knowledge ought to teach 
them more clearly the rights of legislature, their obligations 
to obedience, and the penalties of rebellion. All this is 
mighty well. But my honourable and learned friend ® on the 
floor, who condescends to mark what I say for animadver- 
sion, will disdain that ground. He has heard, as well as I, 
that, when great honours and great emoluments do not win 
over this knowledge to the service of the state, it is a for- 
midable adversary to government. If the spirit be not tamed 
and broken by these happy methods, it is stubborn and liti- 
gious. Abeunt studia in mores. This study renders men 
acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in 
defense, full of resources. In other countries, the people, 
more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill 
principle in government only by an actual grievance; here 
they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the 
grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur mis- 
government at a distance, and snuff the approach of tyranny 
in every tainted breeze. 
The last cause of this disobedient spirit in the colonies is 
hardly less powerful than the rest, as it»is not merely moral, 
but laid deep in the natural constitution of things. Three 
thousand miles of ocean lie between you andthem. No con- 
trivance can prevent the effect of this distance in weakening 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA ene 


government. Seas roll, and months pass, between the 
order and the execution; and the want of a speedy explan- 
ation of a single point is enough to defeat an whole system. 
You have, indeed, winged ministers of vengeance, who 
carry your bolts in their pounces to the remotest verge of 
the sea: but there a power stepsin, that limits the arrogance 
of raging passions and furious elements, and says, ‘‘So far 
shalt thou go, and no farther.” Who are you, that should 
fret and rage, and bite the chains of Nature? Nothing 
worse happens to you than does to all nations who have ex- 
tensive empire ; and it happens in all the forms into which 
empire can be thrown. Im large bodies, the circulation of 
power must be less vigorous at the extremities. Nature has 
said it. The Turk can not govern Egypt, and Arabia, and 
Kurdistan, as he governs Thrace; nor has he the same 
dominion in Crimea and Algiers which he has at Brusa and 
Smyrna. Despotism itself is obliged to truck and huckster. 
The Sultan gets such obedience as he can. He governs 
with a loose rein, that he may govern at all ; and the whole 
of the force and vigour of his authority in his center is derived 
from a prudent relaxation in all his borders. Spain, in her 
provinces, is perhaps not so well obeyed as you are in yours, 
She complies, too; she submits; she watchestimes. This 
is the immutable condition, the eternal law, of extensive and 
detached empire. 

Then, Sir, from these six capital sources, of descent, of 
form of government, of religion in the northern provinces, 
of manners in the southern, of education, of the remoteness 
of situation from the first mover of government,—from all 
these causes a fierce spirit of liberty has grown up. It has 
grown with the growth of the people in your colonies, and 
increased with the increase of their wealth: a spirit, that, 
unhappily meeting with an exercise of power in England, 
which, however lawful, is not reconcilable to any ideas of 
liberty, much less with theirs, has kindled this flame that is 
ready to consume us. 

I do not mean to commend either the spirit in this excess, 


92 BURKE 


or the moral causes which produce it. Perhaps a more 
smooth and accommodating spirit of freedom in them would 
be more acceptableto us. Perhaps ideas of liberty might be 
desired more reconcilable with an arbitrary and boundless 
authority. Perhaps we might wish the colonists to be per- 
suaded that their liberty is more secure when held in trust 
for them by us (as their guardians during a perpetual 
minority) than with any part of it in their own hands. But 
the question is not, whether their spirit deserves praise or 
blame,—what, in the name of God, shall we do with it? 
You have before you the object, such as it is,—with all its 
glories, with all its imperfections on its head. You see the 
magnitude, the importance, the temper, the habits, the dis- 
orders. By all these considerations we are strongly urged 
to determine something concerning it. We are called upon 
to fix some rule and line for our future conduct, which 
may give a little stability to our politics, and prevent the 
return of such unhappy deliberations as the present. Every 
such return will bring the matter before us in a still more - 
untractable form. For what astonishing and incredible things 
have we not seen already! What monsters have not been 
generated from this unnatural contention! Whilst every prin- 
ciple of authority and resistance has been pushed, upon both 
sides, as far as it would go, there is nothing so solid and cer- 
tain, either in reasoning or in practise, that has not been 
shaken. Until very lately, all authority in America seemed 
to be nothing but an emanation from yours. Even the pop- 
ular part of the colony constitution derived all its activity, 
and its first vital movement, from the pleasure of the crown. 
We thought Sir, that the utmost which the discontented col- 
onists could do was to disturb authority; we never dreamt 
they could of themselves supply it, knowing in general what an 
operose business it is to establish a government absolutely 
new. But having, for our purposes in this contention, re- 
solved that none but an obedient assembly should sit, the 
humors of the people there, finding all passage through the 
legal channel stopped, with great violence broke out another 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 93 


way. Some provinces have tried their experiment, as we have 
tried ours; and theirs has succeeded. They have formed a 
government sufficient for its purposes, without the bustle ofa 
revolution, or the troublesome formality of an election. Evi- 
dent necessity and tacit consent have done the business in an 
instant. So well they have done it, that Lord Dunmore 
(the account is among the fragments on your table) tells 
you that the new institution is infinitely better obeyed 
than the ancient government ever was in its most fortunate 
periods. Obedience is what makes government and not the 
names by which it is called: not the name of Governor, as 
formerly, or Committee, as at present. This new govern- 
ment has originated directly from the people, and was not 
transmitted through any of the ordinary artificial media of a 
positive constitution. It was not a manufacture ready formed 
and transmitted to them in that condition from England. 
The evil arising from hence is this: that the colonists hav- 
ing once found the possibility of enjoying the advantages of 
order in the midst of a struggle for liberty, such struggles 
will not henceforward seem so terrible to the settled and 
sober part of mankind as they had appeared before the 
trial. 

Pursuing the same plan of punishing by the denial of the 
exercise of government to still greater lengths, we wholly 
abrogated the ancient government of Massachusetts. We 
were confident that the first feeling, if not the very prospect 
of anarchy, would instantly enforce a complete submission. 
The experiment was tried. A new, strange, unexpected 
face of things appeared. Anarchy is found tolerable. A 
vast province has -now subsisted, and subsisted ina consider- 
able degree of health and vigour, for near a twelvemonth, 
without governor, without public council, without judges, 
without executive magistrates. How long it will continue 
in this state, or what may arise out of this unheard-of situa- 
tion, how can the wisest of us conjecture? Our late experi- 
ence has taught us that many of those fundamental princi- 
ples formerly believed infallible are either not of the impor- 


94 BURKE 


tance they were imagined to be, or that we have not at all ad- 
verted to some other far more important and far more pow- 
erful principles which entirely overrule those we had con- 
sidered as omnipotent. I am much against any further 
experiments which tend to put to the proof any more of 
these allowed opinions which contribute so much to the pub- 
lic tranquillity. In effect, we suffer as much at home by 
this loosening of all ties, and this concussion of all estab- 
lished opinions, as we do abroad. For, in order to prove 
that the Americans have no right to their liberties, we are 
every day endeavouring to subvert the maxims which preserve 
the whole spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans 
ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value 
of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry ad- 
vantage over them in debate, without attacking some of 
those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which 
our ancestors have shed their blood. 

But, Sir, in wishing to put an end to pernicious experi- 
ments, I do not mean to preclude the fullest inquiry. Far 
from it. Far from deciding on a sudden or partial view, I 
would patiently go round and round the subject, and survey it 
minutely in every possible aspect. Sir, if I were capable of en- 
gaging you toan equal attention, I would state, that, as far as 
I am capable of discerning, there are but three ways of pro- 
ceeding relative to this stubborn spirit which prevails in your 
colonies and disturbs your government. These are,—to 
change that spirit, as inconvenient, by removing the causes,— 
to prosecute it, as criminal,—or to comply with it, as necessary. 
I would not be guilty of an imperfect enumeration; I can 
think of but these three. Another has, indeed, been started, 
—that of giving up the colonies; but it met so slight a re- 
ception that I do not think myself obliged to dwell a great 
while uponit. It isnothing but alittle sally of anger, like the 
frowardness of peevish children, who, when they can not get 
all they would have, are resolved to take nothing. 

The first of these plans—to change the spirit, as inconve- 
nient, by removing the causes—I think is the most like a 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 95 


systematic proceeding. It isradicalinits principle; but it is 
attended with great difficulties: some of them little short, as 
I conceive, of impossibilities. This will appear by examining 
into the plans which have been proposed. 

As the growing population of the colonies is evidently 
one cause of their resistance, it was last session mentioned in 
both Houses, by men of weight, and received not without 
applause, that, in order to check this evil, it would be proper 
for the crown to make no further grants of land. But to 
this scheme there are two objections. The first, that there 
is already so much unsettled land in private hands as to 
afford room for an immense future population, although the 
crown not only withheld its grants, but annihilated its soil. 
If this be the case, then the only effect of this avarice of 
desolation, this hoarding of a royal wilderness, would be to 
raise the value of the possessions in the hands of the great 
private monopolists, without any adequate check to the 
growing and alarming mischief of population. 

But if you stopped your grants, what would be the con- 
sequences? The people would occupy without grants. 
They have already so occupied in many places. Youcannot 
station garrisons in every part of these deserts. If you 
drive the people from one place, they will carry on their 
annual tillage, and remove with their flocks and herds to an- 
other. Many of the people in the back settlements are 
already little attached to particular situations. Already they 
have topped the Appalachian mountains. From thence they 
behold before them an immense plain, one vast, rich, level 
meadow: a square of five hundred miles. Over this they | 
would wander without a possibility of restraint ; they would 
change their manners with the habits of their life; would 
soon forget a government by which they were disowned ; 
would become hordes of English Tartars, and, pouring down 
upon your unfortified frontiers a fierce and irresistible cavalry, 
become masters of your governors and your counsellors, 
your collectors and comptrollers, and of all the slaves that 
adhered to them. Such would, and, in no long time, must 


es 


96 BURKE 


be, the effect of attempting to forbid as a crime, and to sup- 
press as an evil, the command and blessing of Providence, 
“ Increase and multiply.” Such would be the happy result 
of an endeavour to keepas a lair of wild beasts that earth 
which God by an express charter has given to the children 
of men. Far different, and surely much wiser, has been our 
policy hitherto. Hitherto we have invited our people, by 
every kind of bounty, to fixed establishments. We have in-. 
vited the husbandman to look to authority for histitle. We 
have taught him piously to believe in the mysterious virtue 
of wax and parchment. We have thrown each tract of land, 
as it was peopled, into districts, that the ruling power should 
never be wholly out of sight. We have settled all we could; 
and we have carefully attended every settlement with 
government. 

Adhering, Sir, as I do, to this policy, as well as for the rea- 
sons I have just given, I think this new project of hedging 
in population to be neither prudent nor practicable. 

To impoverish the colonies in general, and in particular.to 
arrest the noble course of their marine enterprises, would be 
amore easy task. I freely confess it. We have shown a 
disposition to a system of this kind,—a disposition even to 
continue the restraint after the offense,—looking on our- 
selves as rivals to our colonies, and persuaded that of course 
we must gain all that they shall lose. Much mischief we 
may certainly do. The power inadequate to all other things 
is often more than sufficient for this. I do not look on the 
direct and immediate power of the colonies to resist our vio- 
lence as very formidable. In this, however, I may be mis- 
taken. But when I consider that we have colonies for no 
purpose but tobe serviceable to us, it seems to my poor 
understanding a little preposterous to make them unservice- 
able, in order to keep them obedient. It is, in truth, noth- 
ing more than the old, and, as I thought, exploded problem 
of tyranny, which proposes to beggar its subjects into sub- 
mission. But remember, when you have completed your 
system of impoverishment, that Nature still proceeds in her 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 07 


ordinary course ; that discontent will increase with misery ; 
and that there are critical moments in the fortune of all 
states, when they who are too weak to contribute to your 
prosperity may be strong enough to complete your ruin. 
Spoliatis arma supersunt. 

The temper and character which prevail in our colonies 
are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. Wecan not, 
I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade 
them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins 
the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which 
they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the 
imposition ; your speech would betray you. An English- 
man is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Eng- 
lishman into slavery. 

I think it is nearly as little in our power to change their 
republican religion as their free descent, or to substitute the 
Roman Catholic as a penalty, or the Church of England as 
an improvement. The mode of inquisition and dragooning 
is going out of fashion in the Old World, and I should not 
confide much to their efficacy in the New. The education 
of the Americans is also on the same unalterable bottom 
with their religion. Youcan not persuade them to burn their 
books of curious science, to banish their lawyers from their 
courts of law, or to quench the lights of their assemblies by 
refusing to choose those persons who are best read in their 
_ privileges. It would be no less impracticable to think of 
wholly annihilating the popular assemblies in which these 
lawyers sit. The army, by which we must govern in their 
place, would be far more chargeable to us, not quite so ef- 
fectual, and perhaps, in the end, full as difficult to be kept in 
obedience. 

With regard to the high aristocratic spirit of Virginia and 
the southern colonies, it has been proposed, I know, to re- 
duce it by declaring a general enfranchisement of their slaves. 
This project has had its advocates and panegyrists; yet I 
never could argue myself into any opinion of it. Slaves are 


often much attached to their masters. A general wild offer 
7 


98 BURKE 


of liberty would not always be accepted. History furnishes 
few instances of it. It is sometimes as hard to persuade 
slaves to be free as it is to compel freemen to be slaves; 
and in this auspicious scheme we should have both these 
pleasing tasks on our hands at once. But when we talk of 
enfranchisement, do we not perceive that the American 
master may enfranchise, too, and arm servile hands in 
defense of freedom ?—a measure to which other people have 
had recourse more than once, and not without success, in a 
desperate situation of their affairs. 

Slaves as these unfortunate black people are, and dull as 
all men are from slavery, must they not a little suspect the 
offer of freedom from that very nation which has sold them 
to their present masters,—from that nation, one of whose 
causes of quarrel with those masters is their refusal to deal any 
more in that inhuman traffic? An offer of freedom from 
England would come rather oddly, shipped to them in an 
African vessel, which is refused an entry into the ports of 
Virginia or Carolina, with a cargo of three hundred Angola 
negroes. It would be curious to see the Guinea captain at- 
tempting at the same instant to publish his proclamation 
of liberty and to advertise his sale of slaves. 

But let us suppose all these moral difficulties got over. 
The ocean remains, You can not pump this dry; and as 
long as it continues in its present bed so long all the causes 
which weaken authority by distance will continue. 


“ Ye Gods ! annihilate but space and time, 
And make two lovers happy.” 


was a pious and passionate prayer,—but just as reasonable as 
many of the serious wishes of very grave and solemn poli- 
ticians. 

If, then, Sir, it seems almost desperate to think of any al- 
terative course for changing the moral causes (and not 
quite easy to remove the natural) which produce prejudices 
irreconcilable to the late exercise of our authority, but that 
the spirit infallibly will continue, and continuing, will produce 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 99 


such effects as now embarrass us,—the second mode under 
consideration is, to prosecute that spirit in its overt acts, 
as criminal. 

At this proposition, I must pause a moment. The thing 
seems a great deal too big for my ideas of jurisprudence. It 
should seem, to my way of conceiving such matters, that 
there is a very wide difference, in reason and policy, between 
the mode of proceeding on the irregular conduct of scat- 
tered individuals, or even of bands of men, who disturb 
order within the state, and the civil dissensions which may, 
from time to time, on great questions, agitate the several 
communities which compose a great empire. It looks to 
me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas 
of criminal justice to this great public contest. I do not 
know the method of drawing up an indictment against an 
whole people. I can not insult and ridicule the feelings of 
millions of my fellow-creatures as Sir Edward Coke in- 
sulted one excellent individual (Sir Walter Raleigh) at the 
bar. I am not ripe to pass sentence on the gravest public 
bodies, intrusted with magistracies of great authority and 
dignity, and charged with the safety of their fellow-citizens, 
upon the very same title that I am. I really think that for 
wise men this is not judicious, for sober men not decent, for 
minds tinctured with humanity not mild and merciful. 

Perhaps, Sir, I am mistaken in my idea of an empire. 
as distinguished from a single state or kingdom. But my 
idea of it is this: that an empire is the aggregate of many 
states under one common head, whether this head be a 
monarch or a presiding republic. It does, in such constitu- 
tions, frequently happen (and nothing but the dismal, cold, 
dead uniformity of servitude can prevent its happening) 
that the subordinate parts have many local privileges and im- 
munities. Between these privileges and the supreme common 
authority the line may be extremely nice. Of course dis- 
putes, often, too, very bitter disputes, and much ill blood, will 
arise. But though every privilege is an exemption (in the 
case) from the ordinary exercise of the supreme authority, it 


100 BURKE 


isno denial of it. The claim of a privilege seems rather, ex 
vi termini, to imply asuperior power: for to talk of the priv- 
ileges of a state or of a person who has no superior is hardly 
any better than speaking nonsense. Now in such unfortu- 
nate quarrels among the component parts of a great political 
union of communities, I can scarcely conceive anything more 
completely imprudent than for the head of the empire to insist 
that if any privilege is pleaded against his will or his acts, 
that his whole authority is denied,—instantly to proclaim 
rebellion, to beat to arms, and to put the offending provinces 
under the ban. Will not this, Sir, very soon teach the 
provinces to make no distinctions on their part? Will it not 
teach them that the government against which a claim of 
liberty is tantamount to high treason is a government to 
which submission is equivalent to slavery? It may not al- 
ways be quite convenient to impress dependent communities 
with such an idea. 

We are, indeed, in all disputes with the colonies, by the 
necessity of things, the judge. It is true, Sir. But I con- 
fess that the character of judge in my own cause is a thing 
that frightens me. Instead of filling me with pride, I am 
exceedingly humbled by it. Icannot proceed with a stern, 
assured judicial confidence, until I find myself in something 
more like a judicial character. I must have these hesitations 
as long as I am compelled to recollect, that, in my little 
reading upon such contests as these, the sense of mankind 
has at least as often decided against the superior as the sub- 
ordinate power. Sir, let me add, too, that the opinion of 
my having some abstract right in my favour would not put 
me much at my ease in passing sentence, unless I could be 
sure that there were no rights which, in their exercise under 
certain circumstances, were not the most odious of all wrongs 
and the most vexatious of all injustice. Sir, these consider- 
ations have great weight with me, when I find things so 
circumstanced that I see the same party at once a civil liti- 
gant against me in a point of right and a culprit before me, 
while I sit as criminal judge on acts of his whose moral 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA IOL 


quality is to be decided upon the merits of that very litiga- 
tion. Men are every now and then put, by the complexity 
of human affairs, into strange situations; but justice is the 
same, let the judge be in what situation he will. 

There is, Sir, also a circumstance which convinces me that 
this mode of criminal proceeding is not (at least in the pres- 
ent stage of our contest) altogether expedient,—which is 
nothing less than the conduct of those very persons who 
have seemed to adopt that mode, by lately declaring a re- 
bellion in Massachusetts Bay, as they had formerly addressed 
to have traitors brought hither, under an act of Henry the 
Eighth, for trial. For, though rebellion is declared, it is not 
proceeded against as such; nor have any steps been taken 
towards the apprehension or conviction of any individual 
offender, either on our late or our former address; but 
modes of public coercion have been adopted, and such as 
have much more resemblance to a sort of qualified hostility 
towards an independent power than the punishment of re- 
bellious subjects. All this seems rather inconsistent ; but it 
shows how difficult it is to apply these juridical ideas to our 
present case. 

In this situation, let us seriously and coolly ponder. 
What is it we have got by all our menaces, which have been 
many and ferocious? What advantage have we derived 
from the penal laws we have passed, and which, for the time, 
_ have been severe and numerous? What advances have we 
made towards our object, by the sending of a force, which, 
by land and sea, is no contemptible strength? Has the 
disorder abated? Nothing less—When I see things in this 
situation, after such confident hopes, bold promises, and 
active exertions, I can not, for my life, avoid a suspicion that 
the plan itself is not correctly right. 

If, then, the removal of the causes of this spirit of Ameri- 
can liberty be, for the greater part, or rather entirely, im- 
practicable,—if the ideas of criminal process be inapplicable, 
or, if applicable, are in the highest degree inexpedient, what 
way yet remains? No way is open, but the third and last,— 


102 BURKE 


to comply with the American spirit as necessary, or, if you 
please, to submit to it as a necessary evil. 

If we adopt this mode, if we mean to conciliate and con- 
cede, let us see of what nature the concession ought to be. 
To ascertain the nature of our concession, we must look at 
their complaint. The colonies complain that they have not 
the characteristic mark and seal of British freedom. They 
complain that they are taxed in a Parliament in which they 
are not represented. If you mean to satisfy them at all, you 
must satisfy them with regard to this complaint. If you 
mean to please any people, you must give them the boon 
which they ask,—not what you may think better for them, 
but of a kind totally different. Such an act may be a wise 
regulation, but it is no concession; whereas our present 
theme is the mode of giving satisfaction. 

Sir, I think you must perceive that I am resolved this day 
to have nothing at all to do with the question of the right of 
taxation. Some gentlemen startle,—but it is true: I put it 
totally out of the question. It is less than nothing in my 
consideration. I do not indeed wonder, nor will you, Sir, 
that gentlemen of profound learning are fond of displaying 
it on this profound subject. But my consideration is narrow, 
confined, and wholly limited to the policy of the question. 
I do not examine whether the giving away a man’s money be 
a power excepted and reserved out of the general trust of 
government, and how far all mankind, in all forms of polity, 
are entitled to an exercise of that right by the charter of 
Nature,—or whether, on the contrary, a right of taxation is 
necessarily involved in the general principle of legislation, 
and inseparable from the ordinary supreme power. These 
are deep questions, where great names militate against each 
other, where reason is perplexed, and an appeal to authori- 
ties only thickens the confusion: for high and reverend au- 
thorities lift up their heads on both sides, and there is no 
sure footing inthe middle. This point isthe great Serbonian 
bog, betwixt Damiata and Mount Casius old, where armies 
whole have sunk. Ido not intend to be overwhelmed in that 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 103 


bog, though in such respectable company. The question with 
me is, not whether you have a right to render your people 
miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them 
happy. Itis not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what 
humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do. Isa 
politic act the worse for being a generous one? Is no con- 
cession proper, but that which is made from your want of 
right to keep what you grant? Or does it lessen the grace 
or dignity of relaxing in the exercise of an odious claim, be- 
cause you have your evidence-room full of titles, and your 
magazines stuffed with arms to enforce them? What sig- 
nify all those titles and all those arms? Of what avail are 
they, when the reason of the thing tells me that the asser- 
tion of my title is the loss of my suit, and that I could do 
nothing but wound myself by the use of my own weapons? 

Such is steadfastly my opinion of the absolute necessity of 
keeping up the concord of this empire by a unity of spirit, 
though in a diversity of operations, that, if I were sure the 
colonists had, at their leaving this country, sealed a regular 
compact of servitude, that they had solemnly abjured all the 
rights of citizens, that they had made a vow to renounce all 
ideas of liberty for them and their posterity to all genera- 
tions, yet I should hold myself obliged to conform to the 
temper I found universally prevalent in my own day, and to 
govern two millions of men, impatient of servitude, on the 
principles of freedom. I am not determining a point of law; 
I am restoring tranquillity; and the general character and 
situation of a people must determine what sort of govern- 
ment is fitted for them. That point nothing else can or 
ought to determine. 

My idea, therefore, without considering whether we yield 
as matter of right or grant as matter of favour, is, to admit 
the people of our colonies into an interest in the Constitu- 
tion, and, by recording that admission in the journals of 
Parliament, to give them as strong an assurance as the 
nature of the thing will admit that we mean forever to ad- 
here to that solemn declaration of systematic indulgence. 


104. BURKE 


Some years ago, the repeal of a revenue act, upon its 
understood principle, might have served to show that we 
intended an unconditional abatement of the exercise of a 
taxing power. Such a measure was then sufficient to remove 
all suspicion and to give perfect content. But unfortunate 
events since that time may make something further neces- 
sary,—and not more necessary for the satisfaction of the 
colonies than for the dignity and consistency of our own 
future proceedings. 

I have taken a very incorrect measure of the disposition 
of the House, if this proposal in itself would be received 
with dislike. I think, Sir, we have few American financiers. 
But our misfortune is, we are too acute, we are too exquisite 
in our conjectures of the future, for men oppressed with 
such great and present evils. The more moderate among 
the opposers of Parliamentary concession freely confess that 
they hope no good from taxation; but they apprehend the 
colonists have further views, and if this point were conceded, 
they would instantly attack the trade laws. These gentle- 
men are convinced that this was the intention from the 
beginning, and the quarrel of the Americans with taxation 
was no more than a cloak and cover to this design. Such 
has been the language even of a gentleman ® of real modera- 
tion, and of a natural temper well adjusted to fair and equal 
government. 1 am, however, Sir, not a little surprised at 
this kind of discourse, whenever I hear it; and I am the 
more surprised on account of the arguments which I con- 
stantly find in company with it, and which are often urged 
from the same mouths and on the same day. 

For instance, when we allege that it is against reason to 
tax a people under so many restraints in trade as the Ameri- 
cans, the noble lord 7 in the blue ribbon shall tell you that 
the restraints on trade are futile and useless, of no advantage 
to us, and of no burden to those on whom they are im- 
posed,—that the trade to America is not secured by the 
Acts of Navigation, but by the natural and irresistible ad- 
vantage of a commercial preference. 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 105 


Such is the merit of the trade laws in this posture of the 
debate. But when strong internal circumstances are urged 
against the taxes,—when the scheme is dissected,—when 
experience and the nature of things are brought to prove, 
and do prove, the utter impossibility of obtaining an effective 
revenue from the colonies,—when these things are pressed, 
or rather press themselves, so as to drive the advocates of 
colony taxes to a clear admission of the futility of the 
scheme,—then, Sir, the sleeping trade laws revive from their 
trance, and this useless taxation is to be kept sacred, not for 
its own sake, but as a counter-guard and security of the laws 
of trade. 

Then, Sir, you keep up revenue laws which are mischiev- 
ous in order to preserve trade laws that are useless. Such 
is the wisdom of our plan in both its members. They are 
separately given up as of no value; and yet one is always to 
be defended for the sake of the other. But Ican not agree 
with the noble lord, nor with the pamphlet from whence he 
seems to have borrowed these ideas concerning the inutility 
of the trade laws. For, without idolizing them, I am sure 
they are still, in many ways, of great use to us; and in former 
times they have been of the greatest. They do confine, and 
they do greatly narrow, the market for the Americans. But 
my perfect conviction of this does not help me in the least 
to discern how the revenue laws form any security whatso- 
ever to the commercial regulations,— or that these commer- 
cial regulations are the true ground of the quarrel,—or that 
the giving way, in any one instance, of authority is to lose 
all that may remain unconceded. 

One fact is clear and indisputable: the public and avowed 
origin of this quarrel was on taxation. This quarrel has, 
indeed, brought on new disputes on new questions, but cer- 
tainly the least bitter, and the fewest of all, on the trade 
laws. To judge which of the two be the real, radical cause 
of quarrel, we have to see whether the commercial dispute 
did, in order of time, precede the dispute on taxation. 
There is not a shadow of evidence for it. Next, to enable 


106 BURKE 


us to judge whether at this moment a dislike to the trade 
laws be the real cause of quarrel, it is absolutely necessary 
to put the taxes out of the question by a repeal. See how 
the Americans act in this position, and then you will be 
able to discern correctly what is the true object of the con- 
troversy, or whether any controversy at all will remain. 
Unless you consent to remove this cause of difference, it is 
impossible, with decency, to assert that the dispute is not 
upon what it is avowed to be. And I would, Sir, recom- 
mend to your serious consideration, whether it be prudent 
to form a rule for punishing people, not on their own acts, 
but on your conjectures. Surely it is preposterous, at the 
very best. It is not justifying your anger by their miscon- 
duct, but it is converting your ill-will into their delinquency. 

But the colonies will go further.—Alas! alas! when 
will this speculating against fact and reason end? What 
will quiet these panic fears which we entertain of the hostile 
effect of a conciliatory conduct? Is it true that no case can 
exist in which it is proper for the sovereign to accede to the 
desires of his discontented subjects? Is there anything pe- 
culiar in this case, to make a rule for itself? Is all authority 
of course lost, when it is not pushed to the extreme? Is it 
a certain maxim, that, the fewer causes of dissatisfaction are 
left by government, the more the subject will be inclined to 
resist and rebel ? 

All these objections being in fact no more than suspicions, 
conjectures, divinations, formed in defiance of fact and ex- 
perience, they did not, Sir, discourage me from entertain- 
ing the idea of a conciliatory concession, founded on the 
principles which I have just stated. 

In forming a plan for this purpose, I endeavoured to put 
myself in that frame of mind which was the most natural and 
the most reasonable, and which was certainly the most prob- 
able means of securing me from all error. I set out witha 
perfect distrust of my own abilities, a total renunciation of 
every speculation of my own, and with a profound reverence 
for the wisdom of our ancestors, who have left us the inheri- 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 107 


tance of so happy a Constitution and so flourishing an em- 
pire, and, what is a thousand times more valuable, the treas- 
ury of the maxims and principles which formed the one and 
obtained the other. 

During the reigns of the kings of Spain of the Austrian 
family, whenever they were at a loss in the Spanish coun- 
cils, it was common for their statesmen to say that they 
ought to consult the genius of Philip the Second. The 
genius of Philip the Second might mislead them; and the 
issue of their affairs showed that they had not chosen the 
most perfect standard. But, Sir, Iam sure that I shall not 
be misled, when, in a case of constitutional difficulty, I 
consult the genius of the English Constitution. Consulting 
at that oracle, (it was with all due humility and piety), I 
found four capital examples in a similar case before me: 
those of Ireland, Wales, Chester, and Durham. 

Ireland, before the English conquest, though never gov- 
erned by a despotic power, had no Parliament. How far 
the English Parliament itself was at that time modeled ac- 
cording to the present form is disputed among antiquarians, 
But we have all the reason in the world to be assured, that 
a form of Parliament, such as England then enjoyed, she in- 
stantly communicated to Ireland; and we are equally sure 
that almost every successive improvement in constitutional 
liberty, as fast as it was made here, was transmitted thither. 
The feudal baronage, and the feudal knighthood, the roots 
of our primitive Constitution, were early transplanted into 
that soil, and grew and flourished there. Magna Charta, if 
it did not give us originally the House of Commons, gave us 
at least an House of Commons of weight and consequence. 
But your ancestors did not churlishly sit down alone to the 
feast of Magna Charta. Ireland was made immediately a 
partaker. This benefit of English laws and liberties, I con- 
fess, was not at first extended to all Ireland. Mark the con- 
sequence. English authority and English liberty had ex- 
actly the same boundaries. Your standard could never be 
advanced an inch before your privileges. Sir John Davies 


108 BURKE 


shows beyond a doubt, that the refusal of a general commu- 
nication of these rights was the true cause why Ireland was 
five hundred years in subduing; and after the vain projects 
of a military government, attempted in the reign of Queen 
Elizabeth, it was soon discovered that nothing could make 
that country English, in civility and allegiance, but your 
laws and your forms of legislature. It was not English 
arms, but the English Constitution, that conquered Ireland. 
From that time, Ireland has ever had a general Parliament, 
as she had before a partial Parliament. You changed the 
people, you altered the religion, but you never touched the 
form or the vital substance of free government in that king- 
dom. You deposed kings; you restored them ; you altered 
the succession to theirs, as well as to yourown crown; but 
you never altered their Constitution, the principle of which 
was respected by usurpation, restored with the restoration 
of monarchy, and established, I trust, forever by the glori- 
ous Revolution. This has made Ireland the great and 
flourishing kingdom that it is, and, from a disgrace anda 
burden intolerable to this nation, has rendered her a prin- 
cipal part of our strength and ornament. This country 
can not be said to have ever formally taxed her. The irreg- 
ular things done in the confusion of mighty troubles, and on 
the hinge of great revolutions, even if all were done that is 
said to have been done, form no example. If they have any 
effect in argument, they make an exception to prove the 
rule. None of your own liberties could stand a moment, if 
the casual deviations from them, at such times, were suffered 
to be used as proofs of their nullity. By the lucrative 
amount of such casual breaches in the Constitution, judge 
what the stated and fixed rule of supply has been in that 
kingdom. Your Irish pensioners would starve, if they had 
no other fund to live on than taxes granted by English au- 
thority. Turn your eyes to those popular grants from 
whence all your great supplies are come, and learn to respect 
that only source of public wealth in the British empire. 

My next example is Wales. This country was said to 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 109 


be reduced by Henry the Third. It was said more truly to 
be so by Edward the First. But though then conquered, it 
was not looked upon as any part of the realm of England: 
Its old Constitution, whatever that might have been, was 
destroyed; and no good one was substituted in its place. 
The care of that tract was put into the hands of Lords 
Marchers: a form of government of a very singular kind; a 
strange, heterogeneous monster, something between hostil- 
ity and government: perhaps it has a sort of resemblance, 
according to the modes of those times, to that of com- 
mander-in-chief at present, to whom all civil power is granted 
as secondary. The manners of the Welsh nation followed 
the genius of the government; the people were ferocious, res- 
tive, savage, and uncultivated ; sometimes composed, never 
pacified. Wales, within itself, was in perpetual disorder; 
and it kept the frontier of England in perpetual alarm. 
Benefits from it to the state there were none. Wales was 
only known to England by incursion and invasion. 

Sir, during that state of things, Parliament was not idle. 
They attempted to subdue the fierce spirit of the Welsh by 
all sorts of rigorous laws. They prohibited by statute the 
sending all sorts of arms into Wales, as you prohibit by pro- 
clamation (with something more of doubt on the legality) 
the sending arms to America. They disarmed the Welsh 
by statute, as you attempted (but still with more question 
on the legality) to disarm New England by an instruction. 
They made an act to drag offenders from Wales into Eng- 
land for trial, as you have done (but with more hardship) 
with regard to America. By another act, where one of the 
parties was an Englishman, they ordained that his trial 
should be always by English. They made acts to restrain 
trade, as you do; and they prevented the Welsh from the 
use of fairs and markets, as you do the Americans from fish- 
eries and foreign ports. In short, when the statute-book 
was not quite so much swelled as it is now, you find no less 
than fifteen acts of penal regulation on the subject of Wales. 

Here we rub our hands,—a fine body of precedents for 


IIo BURKE 


the authority of Parliament and the use of it !—I admit it 
fully; and pray add likewise to these precedents, that all 
the while Wales rid this kingdom like an incubus; that it 
was an unprofitable and oppressive burden; and that an 
Englishman traveling in that country could not go six yards 
from the high-road without being murdered. 

The march of the human mind is slow. Sir, it was not 
until after two hundred years discovered, that, by an eternal 
law, Providence had decreed vexation to violence, and 
poverty to rapine. Your ancestors did, however, at length 
open their eyes to the ill husbandry of injustice. They 
found that the tyranny of a free people could of all tyrannies 
the least be endured, and that laws made against an whole 
nation were not the most effectual methods for securing its 
obedience. Accordingly, in the twenty-seventh year of 
Henry the Eighth the course was entirely altered. Witha 
preamble stating the entire and perfect rights of the crown 
of England, it gave to the Welsh all the rights and privileges 
of English subjects. A political order was established; the 
military power gave way to the civil; the marches were 
turned into counties. But that a nation should have a right 
to English liberties, and yet no share at all in the funda- 
mental security of these liberties,—the grant of their own 
property,—seemed a thing so incongruous, that eight years 
after, that is, in the thirty-fifth of that reign, a complete and 
not ill-proportioned representation by counties and boroughs 
was bestowed upon Wales by act of Parliament. From 
that moment, as by acharm, the tumults subsided ; obedience 
was restored; peace, order, and civilization followed in the 
train of liberty. When the day-star of the English Consti- 
tution had arisen in their hearts, all was harmony within and 
without :— 

“ Simul alba nautis 
Stella refulsit 
Defluit saxis agitatus humor, 
Concidunt venti, fugiuntque nubes, 


Et minax (quod sic voluere) ponto 
Unda recumbit.” 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA II!I 


The very same year the County Palatine of Chester 
received the same relief from its oppressions, and the same 
remedy to its disorders. Before this time Chester was little 
less distempered than Wales. The inhabitants, without 
rights themselves, were the fittest to destroy the rights of 
others; and from thence Richard the Second drew the stand- 
ing army of archers with which for a time he oppressed 
England. The people of Chester applied to Parliament in 
a petition penned as I shall read to you. 

“To the king our sovereign lord, in most humble wise 
shown unto your most excellent Majesty, the inhabitants of 
your Grace’s County Palatine of Chester: That where the 
said County Palatine of Chester is and hath been alway 
hitherto exempt, excluded, and separated out and from your 
high court of Parliament, to have any knights and burgesses 
within the said court; by reason whereof the said inhabi- 
tants have hitherto sustained manifold disherisons, losses, and 
damages, as well in their lands, goods and bodies, as in the 
good, civil, and politic governance and maintenance of the 
common wealth of their said country: And forasmuch as 
the said inhabitants have always hitherto been bound by the 
acts and statutes made and ordained by your said Highness, 
and your most noble progenitors, by authority of the said 
court, as far forth as other counties, cities, and boroughs 
have been, that have had their knights and burgesses within 
your said court of Parliament, and yet have had neither 
knight ne burgess there for the said County Palatine ; the 
said inhabitants, for lack thereof, have been oftentimes 
touched and grieved with acts and statutes made within 
the said court, as well derogatory unto the most ancient 
jurisdictions, liberties, and privileges of your said County 
Palatine, as prejudicial unto the common wealth, quietness, 
rest, and peace of your Grace’s most bounden subjects in- 
habiting within the same.” 

What did Parliament with this audacious address ?—Re- 
ject it as a libel? Treat it as an affront to government ? 
Spurn it as aderogation from the rights of legislature? Did 


112 BURKE 


they toss it over the table? Did they burn it by the hands 
of the common hangman ?—They took the petition of griev- 
ance, all rugged as it was, without softening or tempera- 
ment, unpurged of the original bitterness and indignation 
of complaint; they made it the very preamble to their act 
of redress, and consecrated its principle to all ages in the 
sanctuary of legislation. 

Here is my third example. It was attended with the suc- 
cess of the two former. Chester, civilized as well as Wales, 
has demonstrated that freedom, and not servitude, is the 
cure of anarchy; as religion, and not atheism, is the true 
remedy for superstition. Sir, this pattern of Chester was 
followed,in the reign of Charles the Second with regard to the 
County Palatine of Durham, which is my fourth example. 
This county had long lain out of the pale of free legislation. 
So scrupulously was the example of Chester followed, that 
the style of the preamble is nearly the same with that of the 
Chester act; and, without affecting the abstract extent of 
the authority of Parliament, it recognizes the equity of not 
suffering any considerable district, in which the British sub- 
jects may act as a body, to be taxed without their own voice 
in the grant. 

Now if the doctrines of policy contained in these preambles 
and the force of these examples in the acts of Parliament, 
avail anything, what can be said against applying them with 
regard to America? Arenotthe people of America as much 
Englishmen as the Welsh ? The preamble of the act of Henry 
the Eighth says, the Welsh speak alanguage no way resembl- 
ing that of his Majesty’s English subjects. Are the Americans 
not as numerous? If we may trust the learned and accurate 
Judge Barrington’s account of North Wales, and take that as 
a standard to measure the rest, there is no comparison. The 
people cannot amount to above 200,000: not a tenth part of 
the numberinthe colonies. Is Americain rebellion? Wales 
was hardly ever free from it. Have you attempted to govern 
America by penal statutes? You made fifteen for Wales. 
But your legislative authority is perfect with regard to 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA I13 


America: was it less perfect in Wales, Chester, and Durham ? 
But America is virtually represented. What! does the 
electric force of virtual representation more easily pass over 
the Atlantic than pervade Wales, which lies in your neigh- 
bourhood ? or than Chesterand Durham, surrounded by abun- 
dance of representation that is actual and palpable? But, Sir, 
your ancestors thought this sort of virtual representation, 
however ample, to be totally insufficient for the freedom of 
the inhabitants of territories that are so near, and compara- 
tively soinconsiderable. How, then, can I think it sufficient 
for those which are infinitely greater, and infinitely more 
remote ? 

You will now, Sir, perhaps imagine that I am on the point 
of proposing to you a scheme for a representation of the 
colonies in Parliament. Perhaps I might be inclined to 
entertain some such thought; but a great flood stops me in 
my course. Opposuit Natura. Ican not remove the eternal 
barriers of the creation. The thing, in that mode, I do not 
know to be possible. As I meddle with no theory, I do not 
absolutely assert the impracticability of such a representa- 
tion; but I do not see my way to it; and those who have 
been more confident have not been more successful. How- 
ever, the arm of public benevolence is not shortened; and 
there are often several means to the same end. What 
Nature has disjoined in one way wisdom may unite in an- 
other. When we can not give the benefit as we would wish, 
let us not refuse it altogether. If wecan not give the prin- 
cipal, let us find a substitute. But how? where? what 
substitute ? 

Fortunately, I am not obliged, for the ways and means of 
this substitute, to tax my own unproductive invention. lI 
am not even obliged to go to the rich treasury of the fertile 
framers of imaginary commonwealths: not to the Republic 
of Plato, not to the Utopia of More, not to the Oceana of 
Harrington. It is before me,—it is at my feet,— 


“ And the rude swain 
Treads daily on it with his clouted shoon.” 


114 BURKE 


I only wish you to recognize, for the theory, the ancient 
constitutional policy of this kingdom with regard to repre- 
sentation, as that policy has been declared in acts of Parlia- 
ment,—and as to the practise, to return to that mode which 
an uniform experience has marked out to you as best, and 
in which you walked with security, advantage, and honour, 
until the year 1763. 

My resolutions, therefore, mean to establish the ents 
and justice of a taxation of America by grant, and not by 
imposition; to mark the legal competency of the colony 
assemblies for the support of their government in peace, and 
for public aids in time of war; to acknowledge that this 
legal competency has had a dutiful and beneficial exercise, 
and that experience has shown the benefit of their grants, 
and the futility of Parliamentary taxation, as a method of 
supply. 

These solid truths compose six fundamental propositions. 
There are three more resolutions corollary to these. If you 
admit the first set, you can hardly reject the others. But if 
you admit the first, I shall be far from solicitous whether 
you accept or refuse the last. I think these six massive 
pillars will be of strength sufficient to support the temple of 
British concord. I have no more doubt than I entertain of 
my existence, that, if you admitted these, you would com- 
mand an immediate peace, and, with but tolerable future 
management, a lasting obedience in America, I am not 
arrogant in this confident assurance. The propositions are 
all mere matters of fact; and if they are such facts as draw 
irresistible conclusions even in the stating, this is the power 
of truth, and not any management of mine. 

Sir, I shall open the whole plan to you, together with such 
observations on the motions as may tend to illustrate them, 
where they may want explanation. 

The first is a resolution,—“ That the colonies and planta- 
tions of Great Britain in North America, consisting of four- 
teen separate governments, and containing two millions and 
upwards of free inhabitants, have not had the liberty and 


« 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA Il5 


privilege of electing and sending any knights and bur- 
gesses, or others, to represent them in the high court of 
Parliament.” 

This is a plain matter of fact, necessary to be laid down, 
and (excepting the description) it is laid down in the lan- 
guage of the Constitution ; it is taken nearly verbatim from . 
acts of Parliament. 

The second is like unto the first,—“ That the said colonies 
and plantations have been made liable to, and bounden by, 
several subsidies, payments, rates, and taxes, given and 
granted by Parliament, though the said colonies and planta- 
tions have not their knights and burgesses in the said high 
court of Parliament, of their own election, to represent the con- 
dition of their country ; by lack whereof they have been often 
times touched and grieved by subsidies, given, granted, and 
assented to, in the said court, ina manner prejudicial to the 
common wealth, quietness, rest, and peace of the subjects 
inhabiting within the same.” 

Is this description too hot or too cold, too strong or too 
weak? Does it arrogate too much to the supreme legis- 
lature? Does it lean too much to the claims of the people ? 
If it runs into any of these errors, the fault is not mine. It 
is the language of your own ancient acts of Parliament. 


‘** Non meus hic sermo, sed que precepit Ofellus 
Rusticus, abnormis sapiens.”’ 


It is the genuine produce of the ancient, rustic, manly, 
home-bred sense of this country. I did not dare to rub off 
a particle of the venerable rust that rather adorns and pre- 
serves than destroys the metal. It would be a profanation 
to touch with a tool the stones which construct the sacred 
altar of peace. I would not violate with modern polish the 
ingenuous and noble roughness of these truly constitutional 
materials. Above all things, I was resolved not to be 
guilty of tampering,—the odious vice of restless and unstable 
minds. I put my foot in the tracks of our forefathers, where 
I can neither wander nor stumble. Determining to fix arti- 


116 BURKE 


cles of peace, I was resolved not to be wise beyond what was 
written; I was resolved to use nothing else than the form of 
sound words, to let others abound in their own sense, and 
carefully to abstain from all expressions of my own. What 
the law has said, I say. In all things else Iam silent. I 
have no organ but for her words. This, if it be not ingeni- 
ous, I am sure is safe. 

There are, indeed, words expressive of grievance in this 
second resolution, which those who are resolved always to be 
in the right will deny to contain matter of fact, as applied to 
the present case; although Parliament thought them true 
with regard to the Counties of Chester and Durham. They 
will deny that the Americans were ever “touched and 
grieved” with the taxes. _ If they consider nothing in taxes 
but their weight as pecuniary impositions, there might be 
some pretence for this denial. But men may be sorely 
touched and deeply grieved in their privileges, as well as in 
their purses. Men may lose little in property by the act 
which takes away all their freedom. When a man is robbed 
of a trifle on the highway, it is not the twopence lost that 
constitutes the capital outrage. This is not confined to 
privileges. Even ancient indulgences withdrawn, without 
offense on the part of those who enjoyed such favours, oper- 
ate as grievances. But were the Americans, then, not 
touched and grieved by the taxes, in some measure, merely 
as taxes? If so, why were they almost all either wholly re- 
pealed or exceedingly reduced? Were they not touched and 
grieved even by the regulating duties of the sixth of George 
the Second? Else why were the duties first reduced to one 
third in 1764, and afterwards to a third of that third in the 
year 1766? Were they not touched and grieved by the 
Stamp Act? I shall say they were, until that tax is re- 
vived. Were they not touched and grieved by the duties 
of 1767, which were likewise repealed, and which Lord 
Hillsborough tells you (for the ministry) were laid contrary 
to the true principle of commerce? Is not the assurance 
given by that noble person to the colonies of a resolution to 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 117 


lay no more taxes on them an admission that taxes would 
touch and grieve them? Is not the resolution of the noble 
lord in the blue ribbon, now standing on your journals, the 
strongest of all proofs that Parliamentary subsidies really 
touched and grieved them? Else why all these changes, 
modifications, repeals, assurances, and resolutions ? 

The next proposition is,—‘ That, from the distance of the 
said colonies, and from other circumstances, no method hath 
hitherto been devised for procuring a representation in Par- 
liament for the said colonies.” 

This is an assertion of a fact. I go no further on the 
paper; though, in my private judgment, an useful represen- 
tation is impossible; Iam sure it is not desired by them, 
nor ought it, perhaps, by us: but I abstain from opinions. 

The fourth resolution is,—‘‘ That each of the said colonies 
hath within itself a body, chosen, in part or in the whole, by 
the freemen, freeholders, or other free inhabitants thereof, 
commonly called the General Assembly, or General Court, 
with powers legally to raise, levy, and assess, according to 
the several usages of such colonies, duties and taxes towards 
defraying all sorts of public services.” 

This competence in the colony assemblies is certain. It 
is proved by the whole tenor of their acts of supply in all 
the assemblies, in which the constant style of granting is, 
“An aid to his Majesty”; and acts granting to the crown 
have regularly, for near a century, passed the public offices 
without dispute. Those who have been pleased paradoxi- 
cally to deny this right, holding that none but the British 
Parliament can grant to the crown, are wished to look to 
what is done, not only in the colonies, but in Ireland, in one 
uniform, unbroken tenor, every session. Sir, I am surprised 
that this doctrine should come from some of the law servants 
of the crown. I say, that, if the crown could be responsible, 
his Majesty,—but certainly the ministers,and even these 
law officers themselves, through whose hands the acts pass 
biennially in Ireland, or annually in the colonies, are in an 
habitual course of committing impeachable offenses. What 


118 BURKE 


habitual offenders have been all Presidents of the Council, 
all Secretaries of State, all First Lords of Trade, all Attor- 
neys and all Solicitors General! However, they are safe, as 
no one impeaches them; and there is no ground of charge 
against them, except in their own unfounded theories. 

The fifth resolution is also a resolution of fact,—“ That 
the said general assemblies, general courts, or other bodies 
legally qualified as aforesaid, have at sundry times freely 
granted several large subsidies and public aids for his 
Majesty’s service, according to their abilities, when required 
thereto by letter from one of his Majesty’s principal Secre- 
taries of State ; and that their right to grant the same, and 
their cheerfulness and sufficiency in the said grants, have 
been at sundry times acknowledged by Parliament.” 

To say nothing of their great expenses in the Indian wars, 
and not to take their exertion in foreign ones, so high as the 
supplies in the year 1695, not to go back to their public con- 
tributions in the year 1710, I shall begin to travel only where 
the journals give me light,—resolving to deal in nothing but 
fact authenticated by Parliamentary record, and to build 
myself wholly on that solid basis. 

On the 4th of April, 1748,8 a committee of this House 
came to the following resolution :— 

“ Resolved, That it is the opinion of this committee, that 
it is just and reasonable, that the several provinces and colo- 
nies of Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, Connecticut, 
and Rhode Island be reimbursed the expenses they have 
been at in taking and securing to the crown of Great Britain 
the island of Cape Breton and its dependencies.” 

These expenses were immense for such colonies. They 
were above 200,000/. sterling: money first raised and ad- 
vanced on their public credit. 

On the 28th of January, 1756°a message from the king 
came to us, to this effect :—‘“‘ His Majesty, being sensible of 
the zeal and vigour with which his faithful subjects of cer- 
tain colonies in North America have exerted themselves in 
defense of his Majesty’s just rights and possessions, recom- 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA IIg 


mends it to this House to take the same into their consider- 
ation, and to enable his Majesty to give them such assistance 
as may be a proper reward and encouragement. 
On the 3d of February, 1756 1 the House came to a suit- 
able resolution, expressed in words nearly the same as those 
of the message; but with the further addition, that the 
money then voted was as an encouragement to the colonies 
to exert themselves with vigour. It will not be necessary to 
go through all the testimonies which your own records have 
given to the truth of my resolutions. I will only refer you 
to the places in the journals :-— 
Vol. XXVII.—16th and I9th May, 1757. 
Vol. XXVIII.—June Ist, 1758,—April 26th and 30th, 
1759,—March 26th and 31st, and April 28th, 1760, 
—Jan. oth and 2oth, 1761. 

Vol. XXIX.—Jan. 22d and 26th, 1762,—March 14th and 
Path} 1763: 

Sir, here is the repeated acknowledgment of Parliament, 
that the colonies not only gave, but gave to satiety. This 
nation has formally acknowledged two things : first, that the 
colonies had gone beyond their abilities, Parliament having 
thought it necessary to reimburse them; secondly, that they 
had acted legally and laudably in their grants of money, and 
their maintenance of troops, since the compensation is ex- 
pressly given as reward and encouragement. Reward is not 
bestowed for acts that are unlawful; and encouragement is 
not held out to things that deserve reprehension. My reso- 
lution, therefore, does nothing more than collect into one 
proposition what is scattered through your journals. I give 
you nothing but your own; and you cannot refuse in the 
gross what you have so often acknowledged in detail. The 
admission of this, which will be so honourable to them and to 
_ you, will, indeed, be mortal to all the miserable stories 
by which the passions of the misguided people have been 
engaged in an unhappy system. The people heard, indeed, 
from the beginning of these disputes, one thing continually 
dinned in their ears: that reason and justice demanded, that 


120 BURKE 


the Americans, who paid no taxes, should be compelled to 
contribute. How did that fact, of their paying nothing, 
stand, when the taxing system began? When Mr. Gren- 
ville began to form his system of American revenue, he 
stated in this House that the colonies were then in debt two 
million six hundred thousand pounds sterling money, and 
was of opinion they would discharge that debt in four years. 
On this state, those untaxed people were actually subject to 
the payment’of taxes to the amount of six hundred and fifty 
thousand a year. In fact, however, Mr. Grenville was mis- 
taken. The funds given for sinking the debt did not prove 
quite so ample as both the colonies and he expected. The 
calculation was too sanguine: the reduction was not com- 
pleted till some years after, and at different times in differ- 
ent colonies. However, the taxes after the war continued 
too great to bear any addition, with prudence or propriety ; 
and when the burdens imposed in consequence of former re- 
quisitions were discharged, our tone became too high to 
resort again to requisition. Nocolony, since that time, ever 
has had any requisition whatsoever made to it. 

We see the sense of the crown, and the sense of Parlia- 
ment, on the productive nature of arevenue by grant. Now 
search the same journals for the produce of the revenue by 
imposition. Where is it ?>—let us know the volume and the 
page. What is the gross, what is the net produce? To 
what service is it applied ? How have you appropriated its 
surplus ?>—What ! can none of the many skilful index-makers 
that we are now employing find any trace of it >—Well, let 
them and that rest together.—But are the journals, which 
say nothing of the revenue, as silent on the discontent P— 
Oh, no! a child may find it. It isthe melancholy burden 
and blot of every page. 

I think, then, I am, from those journals, justified in the 
sixth and last resolution, which is,—‘“‘ That it hath been 
found by experience, that the manner of granting the said 
supplies and aids by the said general assemblies hath been 
more agreeable to the inhabitants of the said colonies, and 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 121 


more beneficial and conducive to the publicservice, than the 
mode of giving and granting aids and subsidies in Parliament, 
to be raised and paid in the said colonies.” 

This makes the whole of the fundamental part of the plan. 
The conclusion is irresistible. You can notsay that you were 
driven by any necessity to an exercise of the utmost rights 
of legislature. You cannot assert that you took on your- 
selves the task of imposing colony taxes, from the want of 
another legal body that is competent to the purpose of sup- 
plying the exigencies of the state without wounding the 
prejudices of the people. Neither is it true that the body so 
qualified, and having that competence, had neglected the 
duty. 

The question now, on all this accumulated matter is,— 
Whether you will choose to abide by a profitable experience 
or a mischievous theory ? Whether you choose to build on 
imagination or fact? whether you prefer enjoyment or 
hope ? satisfaction in your subjects, or discontent ? 

If these propositions are accepted, everything which has 
been made to enforce a contrary system must, I take it for 
sranted, fall along with it. On that ground, I have drawn 
the following resolution, which, when it comes to be moved, 
will naturally be divided in a proper manner :—“ That it may 
be proper to repeal an act, made in the seventh year of the 
reign of his present Majesty, intituled, ‘An act for granting 
certain duties in the British colonies and plantations in 
America; for allowing a drawback of the duties of customs, 
upon the exportation from this kingdom, of coffee and cocoa- 
nuts, of the produce of the said colonies or plantations ; for 
discontinuing the drawbacks payable on China earthenware 
exported to America; and for more effectually preventing 
the clandestine running of goods in the said colonies and 
plantations..—And also, that it may be proper to repeal an 
act, made in the fourteenth year of the reign of his present 
Majesty, intituled, ‘ An act to discontinue, in such manner 
and for such time as are therein mentioned, the landing and 
discharging, lading or shipping, of goods, wares, and merchan- 


122 BURKE 


dise, at the town and within the harbor of Boston, in the 
province of Massachusetts Bay, in North America.’.—And 
also, that it may be proper to repeal an act made in the 
fourteenth year of the reign of his present Majesty, intituled, 
‘An act for the impartial administration of justice, in the 
cases of persons questioned for any acts done by them, in 
the execution of the law, or for the suppression of riots and 
tumults, in the province of the Massachusetts Bay, in New 
England.’—And also, that it may be proper to repeal an act, 
made in the fourteenth year of the reign of his present 
Majesty, intituled, ‘An act for the better regulating the 
government of the province of the Massachusetts Bay, in 
New England.’—And also, that it may be proper to explain 
and amend an act, made in the thirty-fifth year of the reign 
of King Henry the Eighth, intituled, ‘ An act for the trial 
of treasons committed out of the king’s dominions.’ ” 

I wish, Sir, to repeal the Boston Port Bill, because (in- 
dependently of the dangerous precedent of suspending the 
rights of the subject during the king’s pleasure) it was 
passed, as I apprehend, with less regularity, and on more par- 
tial principles, than it ought. The corporation of Boston 
was not heard before it was condemned. Other towns, full 
as guilty as she was, have not had their ports blocked up. 
Even the Restraining Bill of the present session does not go 
to the length of the Boston Port Act. The same ideas of 
prudence, which induced you not to extend equal punish- 
ment to equal guilt, even when you were punishing, induce 
me, who mean not to chastise, but to reconcile, to be satis- 
fied with the punishment already partially inflicted. 

Ideas of prudence and accommodation to circumstances 
prevent you from taking away the charters of Connecticut 
and Rhode Island, as you have taken away that of Massa- 
chusetts Colony, though the crown has far less power in 
the two former provinces than it enjoyed in the latter, and 
though the abuses have been full as great and as flagrant in 
the exempted as in the punished. The same reasons of 
prudence and accommodation have weight with me in restor- 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 123 


ing the charter of Massachusetts Bay. Besides, Sir, the act 
which changes the charter of Massachusetts is in many par- 
ticulars so exceptionable, that if I did not wish absolutely 
to repeal, I would by all means desire to alter it; as several 
of its provisions tend to the subversion of all public and 
private justice. Such, among others, is the power in the 
governor to change the sheriff at his pleasure, and to make a 
new returning officer for every special cause. It is shameful 
to behold such a regulation standing among English laws, 

The act for bringing persons accused of committing mur- 
der under the orders of government to England for trial is 
but temporary. That act has calculated the probable dura- 
tion of our quarrel with the colonies, and is accommodated 
to that supposed duration. I would hasten the happy 
moment of reconciliation, and therefore must, on my princi- 
ple, get rid of that most justly obnoxious act. 

The act of Henry the Eighth for the trial of treasons I do 
not mean to take away, but to confine it to its proper bounds 
and original intention: to make it expressly for trial of 
treasons (and the greatest treasons may be committed) 
in places where the jurisdiction of the crown does not 
extend. 

Having guarded the privileges of local legislature, I would 
next secure to the colonies a fair and unbiased judicature ; 
for which purpose, Sir, 1 propose the following resolution: 
—‘ That, from the time when the general assembly, or gen- 
eral court, of any colony or plantation in North America 
shall have appointed, by act of assembly duly confirmed, a 
settled salary to the offices of the chief justice and other 
judges of the superior courts, it may be proper that the said 
chief justice and other judges of the superior courts of such 
colony shall hold his and their office and offices during their 
good behaviour, and shall not be removed therefrom, but 
when the said removal shall be adjudged by his Majesty in 
council, upon a hearing on complaint from the general 
assembly, or on a complaint from the governor, or the coun- 
cil, or the house of representatives, severally, of the colony 


124 BURKE 


in which the said chief justice and other judges have exer- 
cised the said offices.” 

The next resolution relates to the courts of admiralty. 
It is this:—‘‘ That it may be proper to regulate the courts 
of admiralty or vice-admiralty, authorized by the 15th chapter 
of the 4th George the Third, in such a manner as to make 
the same more commodious to those who sue or are sued in 
the said courts, and to provide for the more decent mainten- 
ance of the judges of the same.” 

These courts I do not wish to take away: they are in 
themselves proper establishments. This court is one of the 
capital securities of the Act of Navigation. The extent of 
its jurisdiction, indeed, has been increased; but this is al- 
together as proper, and is, indeed, on many accounts, more 
eligible, where new powers were wanted, than a court abso- 
lutely new. But courts incommodiously situated, in effect, 
deny justice; and a court partaking in the fruits of its own 
condemnation is a robber. The Congress complain, and 
complain justly, of this grievance. 4 

These are the three consequential propositions. I have 
thought of two or three more; but they come rather too 
near detail, and to the province of executive government, 
which I wish Parliament always to superintend, never to 
assume. If the first six are granted, congruity will carry the 
latter three. If not, the things that remain unrepealed will 
be, I hope, rather unseemly incumbrances on the building 
than very materially detrimental to its strength and 
stability. 

Here, Sir, I should close, but that I plainly perceive some 
objections remain, which I ought, if possible, to remove. 
The first will be, that, in resorting to the doctrine of our an- 
cestors, as contained in the preamble to the Chester act, I 
prove too much: that the grievance from a want of repre- 
sentation, stated in that preamble, goes to the whole of 
legislation as well as to taxation: and that the colonies, 
erounding themselves upon that doctrine, will apply it to 
all parts of legislative authority. 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 125 


To this objection, with all possible deference and humility, 
and wishing as little as any man living to impair the small- 
est particle of our supreme authority, I answer, that the 
words are the words of Parliament, and not mine; and that 
all false and inconclusive inferences drawn from them are 
not mine; for I heartily disclaim any such inference. I 
have chosen the words of an act of Parliament, which Mr. 
Grenville, surely a tolerably zealous and very judicious advo- 
cate for the sovereignty of Parliament, formerly moved to 
have read at your table in confirmation of his tenets. It is 
true that Lord Chatham considered these preambles as de- 
claring strongly in favourof his opinions. He was a no less 
powerful advocate for the privileges of the Americans. 
Ought I not from hence to presume that these preambles 
are as favourable as possible to both, when properly under- 
stood: favourable both to the rights of Parliament, and to 
the privilege of the dependencies of this crown? But, Sir, 
the object of grievance in my resolution I have not taken from 
the Chester, but from the Durham act, which confines the 
hardship of want of representation to the case of subsidies, 
and which therefore falls in exactly with the case of the colo- 
nies, But whether the unrepresented counties were de jure or 
de facto bound the preambles do not accurately distinguish ; 
nor, indeed, was it necessary: for, whether de jure or de facto, 
the legislature thought the exercise of the power of taxing, 
as of right, or as of fact without right, equally a grievance, 
and equally oppressive. 

I do not know that the colonies have, in any general way, 
or in any cool hour, gone much beyond ‘the demand of im- 
munity in relation to taxes. It is not fair to judge of the 
temper or dispositions of any man or any set of men, when 
they are composed and at rest, from their conduct or their 
expressions in a state of disturbance and irritation. It is, 
besides, a very great mistake to imagine that mankind follow 
up practically any speculative principle, either of government 
or of freedom, as far as it will go in argument and logical 
illation. We Englishmen stop very short of the principles 


126 BURKE 


upon which we support any given part of our Constitution 
or even the whole of it together. I could easily, if I had 
not already tired you, give you very striking and convincing 
instances of it. This is nothing but what is natural and 
proper. All government, indeed every human benefit and 
enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act, is founded 
on compromise and barter. We balance inconveniences; 
we give and take; we remit some rights, that we may enjoy 
others; and we choose rather to be happy citizens than 
subtle disputants. As we must give away some natural 
liberty, to enjoy civil advantages, so we must sacrifice some 
civil liberties, for the advantages to be derived from the com- 
munion and fellowship of a great empire. But, in all fair 
dealings, the thing bought must bear some proportion tothe 
purchase paid. None will barter away the immediate jewel 
of his soul. Thougha great house is apt to make slaves 
haughty, yet it is purchasing a part of the artificial impor- 
tance of a great empire too dear, to pay for it all essential 
rights, and all the intrinsic dignity of human nature. None 
of us who would not risk his life rather than fall under a 
government purely arbitrary. But although there are some 
amongst us who think our Constitution wants many improve- 
ments to make it a complete system of liberty, perhaps none 
who are of that opinion would think it right to aim at such 
improvement by disturbing his country and risking every- 
thing that is dear to him. In every arduous enterprise we 
consider what we are to lose, as well as what we are to gain; 
and the more and better stake of liberty every people possess, 
the less they will hazard in a vain attempt to make it more. 
These are the cords of man. Man acts from adequate mo- 
tives relative to his interest, and not on metaphysical specu- 
lations. Aristotle, the great master of reasoning, cautions 
us, and with great weight and propriety, against this spe- 
cies of delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments, 
as the most fallacious of all sophistry. 

The Americans will have no interest contrary to the 
grandeur and glory of England, when they are not oppressed 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 127 


by the weight of it; and they will rather be inclined to 
respect the acts of a superintending legislature, when they 
see them the acts of that power which is itself the security, 
not the rival, of their secondary importance. In this assurance 
my mind most perfectly acquiesces,and I confess I feel not the 
least alarm from the discontents which are to arise from 
putting people at their ease; nor do I apprehend the de- 
struction of this empire from giving, by an act of free grace » 
and indulgence, to two millions of my fellow-citizens some 
share of those rights upon which I have always been taught 
to value myself. 

It is said, indeed, that this power of granting, vested in 
American assemblies, would dissolve the unity of the empire, 
—which was preserved entire, although Wales, and Chester, 
and Durham were added to it. Truly, Mr. Speaker, I do 
not know what this unity means; nor has it ever been heard 
of, that I know, in the constitutional policy of this country. 
The very idea of subordination of parts excludes this notion 
of simple and undivided unity. England is the head; but 
she is not the head and the members too. Ireland has ever 
had from the beginning a separate, but not an independent 
legislature, which, far from distracting, promoted the union 
of thewhole. Everything was sweetly and harmoniously 
disposed through both islands for the conservation of Eng- 
lish dominion and the communication of English liberties. 
I do not see that the same principles might not be carried 
into twenty islands, and with the same good effect. This is 
my model with regard to America, as far as the internal cir- 
cumstances of the two countries are the same. I know no 
other unity of this empire than I can draw from its example 
during these periods, when it seemed to my poor understand- 
ing more united than it is now, or than it is likely to be by 
the present methods. 

But since I speak of these methods, I recollect, Mr. 
Speaker, almost too late, that 1 promised before I finished 
to say something of the proposition of the noble lord ® on 
the floor, which has been so lately received, and stands on 


128 BURKE 


your journals. I must be deeply concerned, whenever it is 
my misfortune tocontinue a difference with the majority of 
this House. But as the reasons for that difference are my 
apology for thus troubling you, suffer me to state them ina 
very few words. I shall compress them into as small a body 
as I possibly can, having already debated that matter at large, 
when the question was before the committee. 

First, then, I can not admit that proposition of a ransom 
by auction,—because it isa mere project. It is a thing new, 
unheard of, supported by no experience, justified by no anal- 
ogy, without example of our ancestors, or root in the Con- 
stitution. It is neither regular Parliamentary taxation nor 
colony grant. Experimentum in corpore vili is a good rule, 
which will ever make me adverse to any trial of experiments 
on what is certainly the most valuable of all subjects, the 
peace of this empire. 7 

Secondly, it is an experiment which must be fatal in 
the end to our Constitution. For what is it but a scheme 
for taxing the colonies in the antechamber of the noble lord 
and his successors? To settle the quotas and proportions 
in this House is clearly impossible. You, Sir, may flatter 
yourself you shall sit 4 state auctioneer, with your hammer 
in your hand, and knock down to each colony as it bids. 
But to settle (on the plan laid down by the noble lord) the 
true proportional payment for four or five and twenty gov- 
ernments, according to the absolute and the relative wealth of 
each, and according to the British proportion of wealth and 
burden, is a wild and chimerical notion. This new taxation 
must therefore come in by the back door of the Constitution. 
Each quota must be brought to this House ready formed. 
You can neither add nor alter. You must register it. You 
can do nothing further. For on what grounds can you de- 
liberate either before or after the proposition? You 
cannot hear the council for all these provinces, quarreling 
each on its own quantity of payment, and its proportion 
to others. If you should attempt it, the Committee of 
Provincial Ways and Means, or by whatever other name 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 129 


it will delight to be called, must swallow up all the time of 
Parliament. 

Thirdly, it does not give satisfaction to the complaint of 
the colonies. They complain that they are taxed without 
their consent. You answer, that you will fix the sum at 
which they shall be taxed. That is, you give them the very 
grievance for the remedy. You tell them, indeed, that you 
will leave the mode to themselves. I really beg pardon; it 
gives me pain to mention it ; but you must be sensible that 
you will not perform this part of the compact. For suppose 
the colonies were to lay the duties which furnished their 
contingent upon the importation of your manufactures ; you 
know you would never suffer such a tax to be laid. You know, 
too, that you would not suffer many other modes of taxation. 
So that, when you come to explain yourself, it will be found 
that you will neither leave to themselves the quantum nor the 
mode, nor indeed anything. The whole is delusion, from 
one end to the other. | 

Fourthly, this method of ransom by auction, unless it be 
universally accepted, will plunge you into great and inextric- 
able difficulties. In what year of our Lord are the propor- 
tions of payments to be settled? To say nothing of the 
impossibility that colony agents should have general powers 
of taxing the colonies at their discretion, consider, I implore 
you, that the communication by special messages and orders 
between these agents and their constituents on each varia- 
tion of the case, when the parties come to contend together, 
and to dispute on their relative proportions, will be a 
matter of delay, perplexity, and confusion, that never can 
have an end. 

If all the colonies do not appear at the outcry, what is 
the condition of those assemblies who offer, by themselves 
or their agents, to tax themselves up to your ideas of their 
proportion? The refractory colonies, who refuse all com- 
position, will remain taxed only to your old impositions, 
which, however grievous in principle, are trifling as to pro- 
duction. The obedient colonies in this scheme are heavily 

2 


130 BURKE 


taxed; the refractory remain unburdened. What will you 
do? Will you lay new and heavier taxes by Parliament on 
the disobedient ? Pray consider in what way you can do 
it. You are perfectly convinced, that, in the way of taxing, 
you can do nothing but at the ports. Now suppose it is 
Virginia that refuses to appear at your auction, while Mary- 
land and North Carolina bid handsomely for their ransom, 
and are taxed to your quota, how will you put these col- 
onies on a par? Will you tax the tobacco of Virginia? 
If you do, you give its death-wound to your English revenue 
at home, and to one of the very greatest articles of your 
own foreign trade. If you tax the import of that rebellious 
colony, what do you tax but your own manufactures, or the 
goods of some other obedient and already well-taxed colony ? 
Who has said one word on this labyrinth of detail, which 
bewilders you more and more as you enter into it? Who 
has presented, who can present, you with a clew to lead you 
out of it? I think, Sir, it is impossible that you should not 
recollect that the colony bounds are so implicated in one 
another (you know it by your other experiments in the bill 
for prohibiting the New England fishery) that you can lay 
no possible restraints on almost any of them which may not 
be presently eluded, if you do not confound the innocent 
with the guilty, and burden those whom upon every prin- 
ciple you ought to exonerate. He must be grossly ignorant 
of America, who thinks that, without falling into this con- 
fusion of all rules of equity and policy, you can restrain any 
single colony, especially Virginia and Maryland, the central, 
and most important of them all. 

Let it also be considered, that either in the present con- . 
fusion you settle a permanent contingent, which will and - 
must be trifling, and then you have no effectual revenue,— 
or you change the quota at every exigency, and then on every 
new repartition you will have a new quarrel. 

Reflect, besides, that, when you have fixed a quota for 
every colony, you have not provided for prompt and punc- 
tual payment. Suppose one, two, five, ten years’ arrears. 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 131 


You cannot issue a Treasury extent against the failing 
colony. You must make new Boston port bills, new re- 
straining laws, new acts for dragging men to England for 
trial. You must send out new fleets, new armies. All is to 
begin again. From this day forward the empire is never to 
know an hour’s tranquillity. An intestine fire will be kept 
alive in the bowels of the colonies, which one time or other 
must consume this whole empire. I allow, indeed, that the 
Empire of Germany raises her revenue and her troops by 
quotas and contingents; but the revenue of the Empire and 
the army of the Empire is the worst revenue and the worst 
army in the world. 

Instead of a standing revenue, you will therefore have a 
perpetual quarrel. Indeed, the noble lord who proposed 
this project of a ransom by auction seemed himself to be of 
that opinion. His project was rather designed for breaking 
the union of the colonies than for establishing a revenue. 
He confessed he apprehended that his proposal would not 
be to theirtaste. I say, this scheme of disunion seems to be 
at the bottom of the project; for I will not suspect that the 
noble lord meant nothing but merely to delude the nation 
by an airy phantom which he never intended to realize. 
But whatever his views may be, as I propose the peace and 
union of the colonies as the very foundation of my plan, 
it can not accord with one whose foundation is perpetual 
discord. 

Compare the two. This I offer to give you is plain and 
simple: the other full of perplexed and intricate mazes. This 
is mild: that harsh. This is found by experience effectual 
for its purposes: the other is a new project. This is univer- 
sal: the other calculated for certain colonies only. This is 
immediate in its conciliatory operation: the other remote, 
contingent, full of hazard. Mine is what becomes the dignity 
of aruling people: gratuitous, unconditional, and not held 
out as matter of bargain and sale. I have done my duty in 
proposing it to you. Ihave, indeed, tired you by a long dis- 
course; but this is the misfortune of those to whose influence 


132 BURKE 


nothing will be conceded, and who must win every inch of 
their ground by argument. You have heard me with good- 
ness. May you decide with wisdom! For my part, I feel 
my mind greatly disburdened by what I have done to-day. 
I have been the less fearful of trying your patience, because 
on this subject I mean to spare it altogether in future. I 
have this comfort,—that, in every stage of the American 
affairs, I have steadily opposed the measures that have pro- 
duced the confusion, and may bring on the destruction, of 
this empire. I now go so far as to risk a proposal of my 
own. If Icannot give peace to my country, I give it to my 
conscience. 

But what (says the financier) is peace to us without 
money? Your plan gives us no revenue.—No! But it 
does: for it secures to the subject the power of refusal,— 
the first of all revenues. Experience is a cheat, and fact a 
liar, if this power in the subject, of proportioning his grant, 
or of not granting at all, has not been found the richest mine 
of revenue ever discovered by the skill or by the fortune of 
man. It does not, indeed, vote you £152,750: I1: 2%ths, 
nor any other paltry limited sum; but it gives the strong- 
box itself, the fund, the bank, from whence only revenues 
can arise amongst a people sensible of freedom: Posita ludi- 
tur arca. Cannot you in England, can not you at this time 
of day, can not you, an House of Commons, trust to the 
principle which has raised so mighty a revenue, and accu- 
mulated a debt of near 140 millions in this country? Is this 
principle to be true in England and false everywhere else? 
Is it not true in Ireland? Has it not hitherto been true in 
the colonies? Why should you presume, that, in any 
country, a body duly constituted for any function will neg- 
lect to perform its duty, and abdicate its trust? Such a 
presumption would go against all government in all modes. 
But, in truth, this dread of penury of supply from a free 
assembly has no foundation in Nature. For first observe, 
that besides the desire which all men have naturally of sup- 
porting the honourof their own government, that sense of 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 133 


dignity, and that security to property, which ever attends 
freedom, has a tendency to increase the stock of the free 
community. Most may be taken where most is accumu- 
lated. And what is the soil or climate where experience has 
not uniformly proved that the voluntary flow of heaped-up 
plenty, bursting from the weight of its own rich luxuriance, 
has ever run with a more copious stream of revenue than 
could be squeezed from the dry husks of oppressed indigence 
by the straining of all the politic machinery in the world ? 

Next, we know that parties must ever exist in a free 
country. Weknow, too, that the emulations of such parties, 
their contradictions, their reciprocal necessities, their hopes, 
and their fears, must send them all in their turns to him that 
holds the balance of the state. The parties are the game- 
sters; but government keeps the table, and is sure to be the 
winner intheend. When this game is played, I really think 
it is more to be feared that the people will be exhausted 
than that government will not be supplied. Whereas what- 
ever is got by acts of absolute power ill obeyed because 
odious, or by contracts ill kept because constrained, will be 
narrow, feeble, uncertain, and precarious. 


“ Kase would retract 
Vows made in pain, as violent and void.” 


I, for one, protest against compounding our demands: I 
declare against compounding, for a poor limited sum, the 
immense, ever-growing, eternal debt which is due to gener- 
ous government from protected freedom. And so may I 
speed in the great object I propose to you, as I think it 
would not only be an act of injustice, but would be the 
worst economy in the world, to compel the colonies to a sum 
certain, either in the way of ransom, or in the way of com- 
pulsory compact. 

But to clear up my ideas on this subject,—a revenue from 
America transmitted hither. Do not delude yourselves: 
you can never receive it,—no, not a shilling. We have ex- 
perience that from remote countries it is not to be expected. 


134 BURKE 


If, when you attempted to extract revenue from Bengal, you 
were obliged to return in loan what you had taken in im- 
position, what can you expect from North America? For, 
certainly, if ever there was.a country qualified to produce 
wealth, it is India; or an institution fit for the transmission, 
it is the East India Company. America has none of these 
aptitudes. If America gives you taxable objects on which 
you lay your duties here, and gives you at the same time a 
surplus by a foreign sale of her commodities to pay the 
duties on these objects which you tax at home, she has per- 
formed her part to the British revenue. But with regard to 
her own internal establishments, she may, I doubt not she 
will, contribute in moderation. J say in moderation; for she 
ought not to be permitted to exhaust herself. She ought 
to be reserved to awar; the weight of which, with the enemies 
that we are most likely to have, must be considerable in her 
quarter of the globe. There she may serve you, and serve 
you essentially. 

For that service, for all service, whether of revenue, trade, 
or empire, my trust is in her interest in the British Consti- 
tution. My hold of the colonies is in the close affection 
which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from 
similar privileges, and equal protection. These are ties 
which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. 
Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights as- 
sociated with your government,—they will cling and grapple 
to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear 
them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood 
that your government may be one thing and their privileges 
another, that these two things may exist without any mutual 
relation,—the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and 
everything hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as 
you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this 
country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple conse- 
crated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and 
sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces 
towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 135 


you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more 
perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have any- 
where. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may 
have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia. But un- 
til you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and 
your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but 
you. This is the commodity of price, of which you have 
the monopoly. This is the true Act of Navigation, which 
binds to you the commerce of the colonies, and through 
them secures to you the wealth of the world. Deny them 
this participation of freedom and you break that sole bond 
which originally made, and must still preserve, the unity of 
the empire. Do not entertain so weak an imagination as 
that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and 
your sufferances, your cockets and your clearances, are 
what form the great securities of your commerce. Do not 
dream that your letters of office, and your instructions, 
and your suspending clauses are the things that hold to- 
gether the great contexture of this mysterious whole. 
These things do not make your government. Dead instru- 
ments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the 
English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to 
them. It is the spirit of the English Constitution, which, 
infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, 
invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to 
the minutest member. 

Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here 
in England? Do you imagine, then, that it is the Land-tax 
Act which raises your revenue? that it isthe annual vote in 
the Committee of Supply which gives you your army ? or 
that it is the Mutiny Bill which inspires it with bravery and 
discipline? No! surely, no! It is the love of the people; 
it is their attachment to their government, from the sense of 
the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, 
which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into 
both that liberal obedience without which your army would 
bea base rabble and your navy nothing but rotten timber. 


136 | BURKE 


All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimer- 
ical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical poli- 
ticians who have no place among us; a sort of people who 
think that nothing exists but what is gross and material,— 
and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors 
of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel 
in the machine. But to men truly initiated and rightly 
taught, these ruling and master principles, which in the opin- 
ion of such men as I have mentioned have no substantial 
existence, are in truth everything, and all inall. Magnanimity 
in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom ; and a great em- 
pire and little minds go ill together. If we are conscious of 
our situation, and glow with zeal to fill our place as be- 
comes our station and ourselves, we ought to auspicate all 
our public proceedings on America with the old warning of 
the Church, “Sursumcorda!’’ We ought to elevate our minds 
to the greatness of that trust to which the order of 
Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of 
this high calling our ancestors have turned a savage wilder- 
ness into a glorious empire, and have made the most exten- 
sive and the only honourable conquests, not by destroying, 
but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of 
the human race. Let us get an American revenue as we 
have got an American empire. English privileges have 
made it all that it is; English privileges alone will make it 
all it can be. 

In full confidence of this unalterable truth, I now (quod 
felix faustumque sit!) lay the first stone of the Temple of 
Peace; and I move you,— 

“That the colonies and plantations of Great Britain in 
North America, consisting of fourteen separate govern- 
ments, and containing two millions and upwards of free in- 
habitants, have not had the liberty and privilege of electing 
and sending any knights and burgesses, or others, to repre- 
sent them in the high court of Parliament.” 

“That the said colonies and plantations have been made 
liable to, and bounden by, several subsidies, payments, rates, 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 137 


and taxes; given and granted by Parliament, though the 
said colonies and plantations have not their knights and bur- 
gesses in the said high court of Parliament, of their own 
election, to represent the condition of their country ; dy lack 
whereof they have been oftentimes touched and grieved by 
subsidies, given, granted, and assented to, in the said court, in 
a manner prejudicial to the commonwealth, quietness, rest, 
and peace of the subjects inhabiting within the same.” 

“That, from the distance of the said colonies, and from 
other circumstances, no method hath hitherto been devised 
for procuring a representation in Parliament for the said 
colonies.” 

“ That each of the said colonies hath within itself a body, 
chosen, in part or in the whole, by the freemen, freeholders, 
or other free inhabitants thereof, commonly called the Gen- 
eral Assembly, or General Court, with powers legally to 
raise, levy, and assess, according to the several usages of 
such colonies, duties and taxes towards defraying all sorts of 
public services.” #8 

‘“‘ That the said general assemblies, general courts, or other 
bodies legally qualified as aforesaid, have at sundry times 
freely granted several large subsidies and public aids for his 
Majesty’s service, according to their abilities, when required 
thereto by letter from one of his Majesty’s principal Secre- 
taries of State; and that their right to grant the same, and 
their cheerfulness and sufficiency in the said grants, have 
been at sundry times acknowledged by Parliament.” 

“That it hath been found by experience, that the manner 
of granting the said supplies and aids by the said general 
assemblies hath been more agreeable to the inhabitants of 
the said colonies, and more beneficial and conducive to the 
public service, than the mode of giving and granting aids 
and subsidies in Parliament, to be raised and paid in the 
said colonies.”’ 

“That it may be proper to repeal an act, made in the 
seventh year of the reign of his present Majesty, intituled, 
‘An act for granting certain duties in the British colonies 


138 BURKE 


and plantations in America; for allowing a drawback of the 
duties of customs, upon the exportation from this kingdom, 
of coffee and cocoa-nuts, of the produce of the said colonies 
or plantations; for discontinuing the drawbacks payable 
on China earthenware exported to America; and for more 
effectually preventing the clandestine running of goods in 
the said colonies and plantations.’ ” 

“ That it may be proper to repeal an act, made in the 
fourteenth year of the reign of his present Majesty, intituled, 
‘An act to discontinue, in such manner and for such time as 
are therein mentioned, the landing and discharging, lading 
or shipping, of goods, wares, and merchandise, at the town 
and within the harbour of Boston, in the province of Massa- 
chusetts Bay, in North America.’” 

“ That it may be proper to repeal an act, made in the four- 
teenth year of the reign of his present Majesty, intituled, 
‘An act for the impartial administration of justice, in the 
cases of persons questioned for any acts done by them, in 
the execution of the law, or for the suppression of riots and 
tumults, in the province of the Massachusetts Bay, in New 
England.’ ”’ ? 

“That it may be proper to repeal an act, made in the 
fourteenth year of the reign of his present Majesty, intituled, 
‘An act for the better regulating the government of the prov- 
ince of the Massachusetts Bay, in New England.’ ” 

“That it may be proper to explain and amend an act, 
made in the thirty-fifth year of the reign of King Henry the 
Eighth, intituled, ‘An act forthe trial of treasons committed 
out of the king’s dominions.’ ” 

“That, from the time when the general assembly, or gen- 
eral court, of any colony or plantation in North America, 
shall have appointed, by act of assembly duly confirmed, a 
settled salary to the offices of the chief justice and other 
judges of the superior courts, it may be proper that the said 
chief justice and other judges of the superior courts of such 
colony shall hold his and their office and offices during their 
good behaviour, and shall not be removed therefrom, but when 


CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA 139 


the said removal shall be adjudged by his Majesty in coun- 
cil, upon a hearing on complaint from the general assembly, 
or on acomplaint from the governor, or the council, or the 
house of representatives, severally, of the colony in which 
the said chief justice and other judges have exercised the 
said offices.” 

“That it may be proper to regulate the courts of ‘admiralty 
or vice-admiralty, authorized by the 15th chapter of the 4th 
George the Third, in such a manner as to make the same 
more commodious to those who sue or are sued in the said 
courts; and to provide for the more decent maintenance of 
the judges of the same.” 


NOTES 


I, The act to restrain the trade and commerce of the provinces of Massachu- 
setts Bay and New Hampshire, and colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island 
and Providence Plantation, in North America, to Great Britain, Ireland, and the 
British Islands in the West Indies: and to prohibit such provinces and colonies 
from carrying on any fishery on the banks of Newfoundland, and other places 
therein mentioned under certain conditions and limitations. 

2. Mr. Rose Fuller. 

3. “ That when the governor, council, and assembly, or general court, of any 
of his Majesty’s provinces or colonies in America shall propose to make pro- 
vision, according to the condition, circumstances, and situation of such 
province or colony, for contributing their proportion to the common defense, 
(such proportion to be raised under the authority of the general court or gen- 
eral assembly of such province or colony, and disposable by Parliament), and 
shall engage to make provision also for the support of the civil government 
and the administration of justice in such province or colony, it will be proper, 
if such proposal shall be approved by his Majesty and the two Houses of Par- 
liament, and for so long as such provision shall be made accordingly, to for- 
bear, in respect of such province or colony, to levy any duty, tax, or assess- 
ment, or to impose any farther duty, tax, or assessment, except only such 
duties as it may be expedient to continue to levy or to impose for the regu- 
lation of commerce: the net produce of the duties last mentioned to be 
carried to the account of such province or colony respectively.”—Resolution 
moved by Lord North in the Committee, and agreed to by the House, 27th 
February, 1775. 

. Mr. Glover. 

. The Attorney-General. 

. Mr. Rice. 

. Lord North. 

. Journals of the House, Vol. XXV. 


ON An ff 


140 BURKE 


9. Journals of the House, Vol. XXVII. 


to. Ibid. 
11. The Solicitor-General informed Mr. Burke, when the resolutions were sepa- 


rately moved, that the grievance of the judges partaking of the profits of the 
seizure had been redressed by office; accordingly the resolution was amended. 

12. Lord North. 

13. The first four motions and the last had the previous question put on 
them. The others were negatived. 

The words in Italics were, by an amendment that was carried, left out of 
the motion; which will appear in the journals, though it is not the practise to 
insert such amendments in the votes. 


ON CERTAIN POINTS RELATIVE TO HIS 
PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 


Delivered in the Guildhall, Bristol, previous to the election in that city, 
September 6, 1780. 


R. MAYOR, AND GENTLEMEN,—I am extremely 

pleased at the appearance of this large and respect- 

able meeting. The steps I may be obliged to take will want 

the sanction of a considerable authority ; and in explaining 

anything which may appear doubtful in my public conduct, 
I must naturally desire a very full audience. 

I have been backward to begin my canvass. The dissolu- 
tion of the Parliament was uncertain; and it did not become 
me, by an unseasonable importunity, to appear diffident of 
the effect of my six years’ endeavours to please you.» I had 
served the city of Bristol honourably, and the city of Bristol 
had no reason to think that the means of honourable service 
to the public were become indifferent to me. 

I found, on my arrival here, that three gentlemen had 
been long in eager pursuit of an object which but two of us 
can obtain. I found that they had all met with encourage- 
ment. A contested election in such a city as this is no light 
thing. I paused on the brink of the precipice. These three 
gentlemen, by various merits, and on various titles, I made 
no doubt were worthy of your favour. I shall never attempt 
to raise myself by depreciating the merits of my competi- 
tors. In the complexity and confusion of these cross pur- 


suits, I wished to take the authentic public sense of my 
141 


142 BURKE 


friends upon a business of so much delicacy. I wished to 
take your opinion along with me, that, if I should give up 
the contest at the very beginning, my surrender of my post 
may not seem the effect of inconstancy, or timidity, or anger, 
or disgust, or indolence, or any other temper unbecoming a 
man who has engaged in the public service. If, on the con- 
trary, I should undertake the election, and fail of success, I 
was full as anxious that it should be manifest to the whole 
world that the peace of the city had not been broken by my 
rashness, presumption, or fond conceit of my own merit. 

I am not come, by a false and counterfeit show of defer- 
ence to your judgment, to seduce it in my favour. I ask it 
seriously and unaffectedly. If you wish that I should retire, 
I shall not consider that advice as a censure upon my con- 
duct, or an alteration in your sentiments, but as a rational 
submission to the circumstances of affairs. If, on the con- 
trary, you should think it proper for me to proceed on my 
canvass, if you will risk the trouble on your part, I will risk 
it on mine. My pretensions are such as you can not be 
ashamed of, whether they succeed or fail. 

If you call upon me, I shall solicit the favour of the city 
upon manly ground. I come before you with the plain con- 
fidence of an honest servant in the equity of a candid and 
discerning master. I come to claim your approbation, not 
to amuse you with vain apologies, or with professions still 
more vain and senseless. I have lived too long to be served 
by apologies, or to stand in need of them. The part I have 
acted has been in open day; and to hold out to a conduct 
which stands in that clear and steady light for all its good 
and all its evil, to hold out to that conduct the paltry wink- 
ing tapers of excuses and promises,—I never will do it. 
They may obscure it with their smoke, but they never can 
illumine sunshine by such a flame as theirs. 

I am sensible that no endeavours have been left untried to 
injure mein your opinion. But the use of character is to © 
be a shield against calumny. I could wish, undoubtedly, (if 
idle wishes were not the most idle of all things), to make every 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 143 


part of my conduct agreeable to every one of my constit- 
uents; but in so great a city, and so greatly divided as this, 
it is weak to expect it. 

In such a discordancy of sentiments it is better to look to 
the nature of things than to the humours of men. The very at- 
tempt towards pleasing everybody discovers a temper always 
flashy, and often false and insincere. Therefore, as I have 
proceeded straight onward in my conduct, so I will proceed 
in my account of those parts of it which have been most ex- 
cepted to. But I must first beg leave just to hint to you 
that we may suffer very great detriment by being open to every 
talker. It is not to be imagined how much of service is lost 
from spirits full of activity and full of energy, who are press- 
ing, who are rushing forward, to great and capital objects, 
when you oblige them to be continually looking back. 
Whilst they are defending one service, they defraud you of 
an hundred. Applaud us when we run, console us when we 
fall, cheer us when we recover; but let us pass on,—for 
God’s sake, let us pass on! 

Do you think, Gentlemen, that every public act in the six 
years since I stood in this place before you,that all the arduous 
things which have been done in this eventful period which 
has crowded into a few years’ space the revolutions of an 
age, can be opened to you on their fair grounds in half an 
hour’s conversation ? 

But it is no reason, because there is a bad mode of in- 
quiry, that there should be no examination at all. Most 
certainly it is our duty to examine; it is our interest, too: 
but it must be with discretion, with an attention to all the 
circumstances and to all the motives; like sound judges, and 
not like cavilling pettifoggers and quibbling pleaders, prying 
into flaws and hunting for exceptions. Look, Gentlemen, 
to the whole tenor of your member’sconduct. Try whether 
his ambition or his avarice have justled him out of the 
. straight line of duty,—or whether that grand foe of the 
offices of active life, that master vice in men of business, a 
degenerate and inglorious sloth, has made him flag and lan- 


144 BURKE 


guish in his course. This is the object of our inquiry. If 
our member’s conduct can bear this touch, mark it for ster- 
ling. He may have fallen into errors, he must have faults; 
but our error is greater, and our fault is radically ruinous to 
ourselves, if we do not bear, if we do not even applaud, 
the whole compound and mixed mass of such a character. 
Not to act thus is folly; I had almost said it is impiety. 
He censures God who quarrels with the imperfections of 
man. 

Gentlemen, we must not be peevish with those who serve 
the people; for none will serve us, whilst there is a court 
to serve, but those who are of a nice and jealous honour. 
They who think everything, in comparison of that honour, to 
be dust and ashes, will not bear to have it soiled and im- 
paired by those for whose sake they make a thousand sacrifices 
to preserve it immaculateand whole. We shall either drive 
such men from the public stage, or we shall send them to the 
court for protection, where, if they must sacrifice their rep- 
utation, they will at least secure their interest. Depend 
upon it, that the lovers of freedom will be free. None will 
violate their conscience to please us, in order afterwards to 
discharge that conscience, which they have violated, by do- 
ing us faithful and affectionate service. If we degrade and 
deprave their minds by servility, it will be absurd to expect 
that they who are creeping and abject towards us will ever 
be bold and incorruptible assertors of our freedom against 
the most seducing and the most formidable of all powers. 
No! human nature is not so formed; nor shall we improve 
the faculties or better the morals of public men by our pos- 
session of the most infallible receipt in the world for making 
cheats and hypocrites. 

Let me say, with plainness, I who am no longer in a pub- 
lic character, that, if, by a fair, by an indulgent, by a gentle- 
manly behaviour, to our representatives, we do not give con- 
fidence to their minds and a liberal scope to their under- 
standings, if we do not permit our members to act upon a 
very enlarged view of things, we shall at length infallibly 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 145 


degrade our national representation into a confused and 
scuffling bustle of local agency. When the popular member 
is narrowed in his ideas and rendered timid in his proceed- 
ings, the service of the crown will be the sole nursery of 
statesmen. Among the frolics of the court, it may at length 
take that of attending to its business. Then the monopoly 
of mental power will be added to the power of all other kinds 
it possesses. On the side of the people there will be nothing 
but impotence: for ignorance is impotence; narrowness of 
mind is impotence; timidity is itself impotence, and makes 
all other qualities that go along with it impotent and useless, 

At present it is the plan of the court to make its servants 
insignificant. Ifthe people should fall into the same humour, 
and should choose their servants on the same principles of 
mere obsequiousness and flexibility and total vacancy or in- 
difference of opinion in all public matters, then no part of 
the state will be sound, and it will be in vain to think of 
saving it. 

I thought it very expedient at this time to give you this 
candid counsel; and with this counsel I would. willingly 
close, if the matters which at various times have been ob- 
jected to me in this city concerned only myself and my own 
election. These charges, I think, are four in number: my 
neglect of a due attention to my constituents, the not paying 
more frequent visits here; my conduct on the affairs of the 
first Irish Trade Acts; my opinion and mode of proceeding | 
on Lord Beauchamp’s Debtors’ Bills; and my votes on the 
late affairs of the Roman Catholics. All of these (except 
perhaps the first) relate to matters of very considerable public 
concern ; and it is not lest you should censure me improp- 
erly, but lest you should form improper opinions on matters 
of some moment to you, that I trouble you at all upon the 
subject. My conduct is of small importance. 

With regard to the first charge, my friends have spoken to 
me of it in the style of amicable expostulation,—not so much 
blaming the thing as lamenting the effects. Others, less 


partial to me, were less kind in assigning the motives. I 
10 


146 BURKE 


admit, there is a decorum and propriety in a member of Par- 
liament’s paying a respectful court to his constituents. If I 
were conscious to myself that pleasure, or dissipation, or 
low, unworthy occupations had detained me from personal 
attendance on you, I would readily admit my fault, and quietly 
submit to the penalty. But, Gentlemen, I live at an hundred 
miles’ distance from Bristol; and at the end of a session I 
come to my own house, fatigued in body and in mind, toa 
little repose, and to a very little attention to my family and 
my private concerns. A visit to Bristol is always a sort of 
canvass, else it will do more harm than good. To pass from 
the toils of a session to the toils of a canvass is the furthest 
thing in the world from repose. I could hardly serve you as 
I have done, and court you too. Most of you have heard 
that I do not very remarkably spare myself in public business ; 
and in the private business of my constituents I have done 
very near as much as those who have nothing else to do. 
My canvass of you was not on the ’change, nor in the county 
meetings, nor in the clubs of this city: it was in the House 
of Commons; it was at the Custom-House; it was at the 
Council; it was at the Treasury; it was at the Admiralty. 
I canvassed you through your affairs, and not your persons. 
I was not only your representative as a body; I was the 
agent, the solicitor of individuals ; I ran about wherever your 
affairs could call me; and inacting for you, I often appeared 
rather as a ship-broker than as a member of Parliament. 
There was nothing too laborious or too low for me to under- 
take. The meanness of the business was raised by the dig- 
nity of the object. If some lesser matters have slipped 
through my fingers, it was because I filled my hands too full, 
and, in my eagerness to serve you, took in more than any 
hands could grasp. Several gentlemen stand round me whoare 
my willing witnesses ; and there are others who, if they were 
here, would be still better, because they would be unwilling 
witnesses to the same truth. It was in the middle of a sum- 
mer residence in London, and in the middle of a negotiation 
at the Admiralty for your trade, that I was called to Bristol ; 


a 


PANTRY 


~ 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 147 


and this late visit, at this late day, has been possibly in pre- 
judice to your affairs. 

Since I have touched upon this matter, let me say, Gentle- 
men, that, if I had a disposition or a right to complain, I 
have some cause of complaint on my side. Witha petition 
of this city in my hand, passed through the corporation 
without a dissenting voice, a petition in unison with almost 
the whole voice of the kingdom, (with whose formal thanks 
I was covered over), whilst I laboured on no less than five 
bills for a public reform, and fought, against the opposition 
of great abilities and of the greatest power, every clause and 
every word of the largest of those bills, almost to the very 
last day of a very long session,—all this time a canvass in 
Bristol was as calmly carried on as if I were dead. I was 
considered as a man wholly out of the question. Whilst I 
watched and fasted and sweated in the House of Commons, 
by the most easy and ordinary arts of election, by dinners 
and visits, by ‘“ How do you dos,” and “ My worthy friends,” 
I was to be quietly moved out of my seat,—and promises 
were made, and engagements entered into, without any ex- 
ception or reserve, as if my laborious zeal in my duty had 
been a regular abdication of my trust. 

To open my whole heart to you on this subject, I do con- 
fess, however, that there were other times, besides the two 
years in which I did visit you, when I was not wholly with- 
out leisure for repeating that mark of my respect. But I 
could not bring my mind to see you. You remember that 
in the beginning of this American war (that era of calamity, 
disgrace, and downfall, an era which no feeling mind will 
ever mention without a tear for England) you were greatly 
divided,—and a very strong body, if not the strongest, op- 
posed itself to the madness which every art and every power 
were employed to render popular, in order that the errors of 
the rulers might be lost in the general blindness of the na- 
tion. This opposition continued until after our great, but © 
most unfortunate victory at Long Island. Then all the 
mounds and banks of our constancy were borne down at 


148 - BURKE 


once, and the frenzy of the American war broke in upon us 
like a deluge. This victory, which seemed to put an im- 
mediate end to all difficulties, perfected us in that spirit of 
domination which our unparalleled prosperity had but too 
long nurtured. We had been so very powerful, and so very 
prosperous, that even the humblest of us were degraded 
into the vices and follies of kings. We lost all measure be-- 
tween means and ends; and our headlong desires became 
our politics and our morals. Allmen who wished for peace, 
or retained any sentiments of moderation, were overborne 
or silenced; and this city was led by every artifice (and 
probably with the more management because I was one of 
your members) to distinguish itself by its zeal for that fatal 
cause. In this temper of yours and of my mind, I should 
sooner have fled to the extremities of the earth than have 
shown myself here. I, who saw in every American victory © 
(for you have had a long series of these misfortunes) the 
germ and seed of the naval power of France and Spain, 
which all our heat and warmth against America was only 
hatching into life,—I should not have been a welcome visi- 
tant, with the brow and the language of such feelings. 
When afterwards the other face of your calamity was turned 
upon you, and showed itself in defeat and distress, I shunned 
you full as much. I felt sorely this variety in our wretched- 
ness; and I did not wish to have the least appearance of in- 
sulting you with that show of superiority, which, though it 
may not be assumed, is generally suspected, in a time of 
calamity, from those whose previous warnings have been 
despised. Icould not bear to show you a representative 
whose face did not reflect that of his constituents,—a face 
that could not joy in, your joys, and sorrow in your sorrows, 
But time at length has made us all of one opinion, and we 
have all opened our eyes on the true nature of the American 
war,—to the true nature of all its successes and all its 
failures. 

In that public storm, too, I had my private feelings. I 
had seen blown down and prostrate on the ground several of 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 149 


those houses to whom I was chiefly indebted for the honour 
this city has done me. I confess, that, whilst the wounds 
of those I loved were yet green, I could not bear to show 
myself in pride and triumph in that place into which their 
partiality had brought me, and to appear at feasts and re- 
joicings in the midst of the grief and calamity of my warm 
friends, my zealous supporters, my generous benefactors. 
This is a true, unvarnished, undisguised state of the affair. 
You will judge of it. 

This is the only one of the charges in which I am_person- 
ally concerned. Asto the other matters objected against 
me, which in their turn I shall mention to you, remember 
once more 1 do not mean to extenuate or excuse. Why 
should I, when the things charged are among those upon 
which I found all my reputation? What would be left to 
me, if I myself was the man who softened and blended and 
diluted and weakened all the distinguishing colours of my 
life, so as to leave nothing distinct and determinate in my 
whole conduct? 

It has been said, and it is the second charge, that in the 
questions of the Irish trade I did not consult the interest of 
my constituents,—or, to speak out strongly, that I rather 
acted as a native of Ireland than as an English member of 
Parliament. 

I certainly have very warm good wishes for the place of 
my birth. But the sphere of my duties is my true country. 
It was as a man attached to your interests, and zealous for the 
conservation of your power and dignity, that I acted on 
that occasion, and on all occasions. You were involved in 
the American war. A new world of policy was opened, to 
which it was necessary we should conform, whether we 
would or not; and my only thought was how to conform to 
our situation in such a manner as to unite to this kingdom, 
in prosperity and in affection, whatever remained of the em- 
pire. I was true to my old, standing, invariable principle, 
that all things which came from Great Britain should issue 
as a gift of her bounty and beneficence, rather than as claims 


150 BURKE 


recovered against a struggling litigant,—or at least, that, 
if your beneficence obtained no credit in your concessions, 
yet that they should appear the salutary provisions of your 
wisdom and foresight, not as things wrung from you with 
your blood by the cruel gripe of a rigid necessity. The 
first concessions, by being (much against my will) mangled 
and stripped of the parts which were necessary to make out 
their just correspondence and connection in trade, were of . 
no use. The next year a feeble attempt was made to bring 
the thing into better shape. This attempt (countenanced 
by the minister), on the very first appearance of some popu- 
lar uneasiness, was, after a considerable progress through the 
House, thrown out by him. 

What was the consequence? The whole kingdom of 
Ireland was instantly in a flame. Threatened by foreigners, 
and, as they thought, insulted by England, they resolved at 
once to resist the power of France and to cast off yours. 
As for us, we were able neither to protect nor to restrain 
them. Forty thousand men were raised and disciplined 
without commission from the crown. Two illegal armies 
were seen with banners displayed at the same time and in 
the same country. No executive magistrate, no judicature, 
in Ireland, would acknowledge the legality of the army 
which bore the king’s commission ; and no law, or appearance 
of law, authorized the army commissioned by itself. In this 
unexampled state of things, which the least error, the least 
trespass on the right or left, would have hurried down the 


precipice into an abyss of blood and confusion, the people ~ 


of Ireland demand a freedom of trade with arms in their 
hands. They interdict all commerce between the two na- 
tions. They deny all new supply in the House of Com- 
mons, although in time of war. They stint the trust of the 
old revenue, given for two years to all the king’s predeces- 
sors, to six months. The British Parliament, in a former 
session, frightened into a limited concession by the menaces 
of Ireland, frightened out of it by the menaces of England, 
was now frightened back again, and made an universal sur- 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 151 


render of all that had been thought the peculiar, reserved, 
uncommunicable rights of England: the exclusive commerce. 
of America, of Africa, of the West Indies,—all the enumera- 
tions of the Acts of Navigation,—all the manufactures,— 
iron, glass, even the last pledge of jealousy and pride, the 
interest hid in the secret of our hearts, the inveterate preju- 
dice molded into the constitution of our frame, even the 
sacred fleece itself, all went together. No reserve, no ex- 
ception; no debate, no discussion. A sudden light broke 
in upon us all. It broke in, not through well-contrived and. 
well-disposed windows, but through flaws and breaches,— 
through the yawning chasms of our ruin. We were taught 
wisdom by humiliation. No town in England presumed to 
have a prejudice, or dared to mutter a petition. What was 
worse, the whole Parliament of England, which retained au- 
thority for nothing but surrenders, was despoiled of every 
shadow ofits superintendence. It was, without any qualifica- 
tion, denied in theory, as it had been trampled upon in prac- 
tise. This scene of shame and disgrace has, in a manner, 
whilst I am speaking, ended by the perpetual establishment 
of a military power in the dominions of this crown, without 
consent of the British legislature,! contrary to the policy of 
the Constitution, contrary to the Declaration of Right; and 
by this your liberties are swept away along with your su- 
preme authority,—and both, linked together from the begin- 
ning, have, I am afraid, both together perished forever. 
What! Gentlemen, was I not to foresee, or foreseeing, 

was I not to endeavour to save you from all these multiplied 
mischiefs and disgraces? Would the little, silly, canvass 
prattle of obeying instructions, and having no opinions but 
yours, and such idle, senseless tales, which amuse the vacant 
ears of unthinking men, have saved you from “the pelting 
of that pitiless storm,” to which the loose improvidence, the 
cowardly rashness, of those who dare not look danger in the 
face so as to provide against it in time, and therefore throw 
themselves headlong into the midst of it, have exposed this 
degraded nation, beat down and prostrate on the earth, un- 


152 | ' BURKE 


-sheltered, unarmed, unresisting ? Was I an Irishman on that 
day that I boldly withstood our pride? or on the day that 
I hung down my head, and wept in shame and silence over 
the humiliation of Great Britain? I became unpopular in 
England for the one, and in Ireland for the other. What 
then? What obligation lay on me to be popular? Iwas 
bound to serve both kingdoms. To be pleased with my 
service was their affair, not mine. 

I was an Irishman in the Irish business, just as much as I 
was an American, when, on the same principles, I wished 
you to concede to America at a time when she prayed con- 
cession at our feet. Just as much was I an American, when 
I wished Parliament to offer terms in victory, and not to 
wait the well-chosen hour of defeat, for making good by 
weakness and by supplication a claim of prerogative, pre- 
eminence, and authority. 

Instead of requiring it from me, asa point of duty, to 
kindle with your passions, had you all been as cool as I was, | 
you would have been saved disgraces and distresses that are 
unutterable. Do you remember our commission? We sent 
out a solemn embassy across the Atlantic Ocean, to lay the 
crown, the peerage, the commons of Great Britain at the 
feet of the American Congress. That our disgrace might 
want no sort of brightening and burnishing, observe who 
they were that composed this famous embassy. My Lord 
Carlisle is among the first ranks of our nobility. He is the 
identical man who, but two years before, had been put for- 
ward, at the opening of a session, in the House of Lords, as 
the mover of an haughty and rigorous address against 
America. He was put in the front of the embassy of sub- 
mission. Mr. Eden was taken from the office of Lord Suf- 
folk, to whom he was then Under-Secretary of State,—from 
the office of that Lord Suffolk who but a few weeks before, 
in his place in Parliament, did not deign to inquire where a 
congress of vagrants was to be found. This Lord Suffolk 
sent Mr. Eden to find these vagrants, without knowing where 
his king’s generals were to be found who were joined in the 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 153 


same commission of supplicating those whom they were sent 
to subdue. They enter the capital of America only to 
abandon it; and these assertors and representatives of the 
dignity of England, at the tail of a flying army, let fly their 
Parthian shafts of memorials and remonstrances at random 
behind them. Their promises and their offers, their flatteries 
and their menaces, were all despised ; and we were saved the 
disgrace of their formal reception only because the Congress 
scorned to receive them; whilst the state-house of independ- 
ent Philadelphia opened her doors to the public entry of the 
ambassador of France. From war and blood we went to 
submission, and from submission plunged back again to war 
and blood, to desolate and be desolated, without measure, 
hope, orend. I ama Royalist: I blushed for this degrada- 
tion of the crown. I ama Whig; I blushed for the dis- 
honour of Parliament. I amatrue Englishman: I felt to 
the quick for the disgrace of England. I ama man: J felt 
for the melancholy reverse of human affairs in the fall of the 
first power in the world. 

To read what was approaching in Ireland, in the black and 
bloody characters of the American war, was a painful, but it 
was a necessary part of my public duty. For, Gentlemen, 
it is not your fond desires or mine that can alter the nature 
of things; by contending against which, what have we got, 
or shall ever get, but defeat and shame? I did not obey 
your instructions. No. I conformed to the instructions of 
truth and Nature, and maintained your interest, against your 
opinions, with a constancy that became me. A representa- 
tive worthy of you ought to be a person of stability. I am 
to look, indeed, to your opinions,—but to such opinions as 
you and I must have five years hence. I was not to look to 
the flash of the day. I knew that you chose me, in my 
place, along with others, to bea pillar of the state, and not 
a weathercock on the top of the edifice, exalted for my levity 
and versatility, and of no use but to indicate the shiftings of 
‘every fashionable gale. Would to God the value of my 
sentiments on Ireland and on America had been at this day 


eee BURKE 


a subject of doubt and discussion! No matter what my suf- 
ferings had been, so that this kingdom had kept the au- 
thority I wished it to maintain, by a grave foresight, and by 
an equitable temperance in the use of its power. 

The next article of charge on my public conduct, and that 
which I find rather the most prevalent of all, is Lord Beau- 
champ’s bill: I mean his bill of last session, for reforming 
the law-process concerning imprisonment. It is said, to ag- 
gravate the offense, that I treated the petition of this city 
with contempt even in presenting it to the House, and ex- 
pressed myself in terms of marked disrespect. Had this 
latter part of the charge been true, no merits on the side of 
the question which I took could possibly excuse me. But 
I am incapable of treating this city with disrespect. Very 
fortunately, at this minute (if my bad eyesight does not de- 
ceive me), the worthy gentleman? deputed on this business 
stands directly before me. To him I appeal, whether I did 
not, though it militated with my oldest and my most recent 
public opinions, deliver the petition with a strong and more 
than usual recommendation to the consideration of the 
House, on account of the character and consequence of those 
who signed it. I believe the worthy gentleman will tell 
you, that, the very day I received it, I applied to the Solic- | 
itor, now the Attorney General, to give it an immediate 
consideration; and he most obligingly and instantly con- 
sented to employ a great deal of his very valuable time to 
write an explanation of the bill. I attended the committee 
with all possible care and diligence, in order that every ob- 
jection of yours might meet with a solution, or produce an 
alteration. I entreated your learned recorder (always ready 
in business in which you take a concern) to attend. But 
what will you say to those who blame me for supporting 
Lord Beauchamp’s bill, as a disrespectful treatment of your 
petition, when you hear, that, out of respect to you, I myself 
was the cause of the loss of that very bill? For the noble 
lord who brought it in, and who, I must say, has much merit - 
for this and some other measures, at my request consented 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 155 


to put it off for a week, which the Speaker’s illness length- 
ened to a fortnight; and then the frantic tumult about 
Popery drove that and every rational business from the 
House. So that, if I chose to make a defense of myself, on 
the little principles of a culprit, pleading in his exculpation, 
I might not only secure my acquittal, but make merit with 
the opposers of the bill. But I shall do no such thing. 
The truth is, that I did occasion the loss of the bill, and by 
a delay caused by my respect to you. But such an event 
was never in my contemplation. And I am so far from tak- 
ing credit for the defeat of that measure, that I can not suf- 
ficiently lament my misfortune, if but one man, who ought 
to be at large, has passed a year in prison by my means. I 
am.a debtor to the debtors. I confess judgment. I owe 
what, if ever it be in my power I shall most certainly pay,— 
ample atonement and usurious amends to liberty and hu- 
manity for my unhappy lapse. For, Gentlemen, Lord 
Beauchamp’s bill was a law of justice and policy, as far as it 
went: I say, as far as it went; for its fault was its being in 
the remedial part miserably defective. 

There are two capital faults in our law with relation to 
civil debts. One is, that every man is presumed solvent: 
a presumption, in innumerable cases, directly against truth. 
Therefore the debtor is ordered, on a supposition of ability 
and fraud, to be coerced his liberty until he makes payment. 
By this means, in all cases of civil insolvency, without a par- 
don from his creditor, he is to be imprisoned for life; and 
thus a miserable mistaken invention of artificial science 
operates to change a civil into a criminal judgment, and to 
scourge misfortune or indiscretion with a punishment which 
the law does not inflict on the greatest crimes. | 

The next fault is, that the inflicting of that punishment 
is not on the opinion of an equal and public judge, but is 
referred to the arbitrary discretion of a private, nay, inter- 
ested, and irritated, individual. He, who formally is, and 
substantially ought to be, the judge, is in reality no more 
than ministerial, a mere executive instrument of a private 


156 BURKE 


man, who is at once judge and party. Every idea of judi. 
cial order is subverted by this procedure. If the insolvency 
be no crime, why is it punished with arbitrary imprison- 
ment? If it be a crime, why is it delivered into private 
hands to pardon without discretion, or to punish without 
mercy and without measure? 

To these faults, gross and cruel faults in our law, the ex- 
cellent principle of Lord Beauchamp’s bill applied some sort 
of remedy. I know that credit must be preserved: but 
equity must be preserved, too; and it is impossible that 
anything should be necessary to commerce which is incon- 
sistent with justice. The principle of credit was not weak- 
ened by that bill. God forbid! The enforcement of that 
credit was only put into the same public judicial hands on 
which we depend for our lives and all that makes life dear 
to us. But, indeed, this business was taken up too warmly, 
both here and elsewhere. The bill was extremely mistaken. 
It was supposed to enact what it never enacted; and com- 
plaints were made of clauses in it, as novelties, which existed 
before the noble lord that brought in the bill was born. 
There was a fallacy that ran through the whole of the objec- 
tions. The gentlemen who opposed the bill always argued 
as if the option lay between that bill and the ancient law. 
But this is a grand mistake. For, practically, the option is 
between not that bill and the old law, but between that bill. 
and those occasional laws called acts of grace. For the 
operation of the old law is so savage, and so inconvenient 
to society, that for along time past, once in every Parliament, — 
and lately twice, the legislature has been obliged to make a ~ 
general arbitrary jail-delivery, and at once to set open, by 
its sovereign authority, all the prisons in England. 

Gentlemen, I never relished acts of grace, nor ever sub- 
mitted to them but from despair of better. They are a dis- 
honourable invention, by which, not from humanity, not from 
policy, but merely because we have not room enough to 
hold these victims of the absurdity of our laws, we turn 
loose upon the public three or four thousand naked wretches, 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 157 


corrupted by the habits, debased by the ignominy of a 
prison. If the creditor had a right to those carcasses as a 
natural security for his property, I am sure we have no right 
to deprive him of that security. But if the few pounds of 
flesh were not necessary to his security, we had not a right 
to detain the unfortunate debtor, without any benefit at all 
to the person who confined him. Take it as you will, we 
commit injustice. Now Lord Beauchamp’s bill intended to 
do deliberately, and with great caution and circumspection, 
upon each several case, and with all attention to the just 
claimant, what acts of grace do in a much greater measure, 
and with very little care, caution, or deliberation. 

I suspect that here, too, if we contrive to oppose this bill, 
we shall be found in a struggle against the nature of things. 
For, as we grow enlightened, the public will not bear, for 
any length of time, to pay for the maintenance of whole 
armies of prisoners, nor, at their own expense, submit to 
keep jails as a sort of garrisons, merely to fortify the absurd 
principle of making men judges in their own cause. For 
credit has little or no concern in this cruelty. I speak ina 
commercial assembly. You know that credit is given be- 
cause capital must be employed; that men calculate the 
chances of insolvency ; and they either withhold the credit, 
or make the debtor pay the risk in the price. The counting- 
house has no alliance with the jail. Holland understands 
trade as well as we, and she has done much more than this 
obnoxious bill intended to do. There was not, when Mr. 
Howard visited Holland, more than one prisoner for debt 
in the great city of Rotterdam. Although Lord Beau- 
champ’s act (which was previous to this bill, and intended 
to feel the way for it) has already preserved liberty to thou- 
sands, and though it is not three years since the last act of 
grace passed, yet, by Mr. Howard’s last account, there were 
near three thousand again in jail. JI can not name this gen- 
tleman without remarking that his labours and writings have 
done much to open the eyes and hearts of mankind. He 
has visited all Europe,—not to survey the sumptuousness of 


158 BURKE 


palaces or the stateliness of temples, not to make accurate 
measurements of the remains of ancient grandeur nor to 
form a scale of the curiosity of modern art, not to collect 
medals or collate manuscripts,—but to dive into the depths 
of dungeons, to plunge into the infection of hospitals, to 
survey the mansions of sorrow and pain, to take the gauge 
and dimensions of misery, depression, and contempt, to re- 
member the forgotten, to attend to the neglected, to visit 
the forsaken, and to compare and collate the distresses of 
all men in all countries. His plan is original; and it is as 
full of genius as it is of humanity. It was a voyage of dis- 
covery, a circumnavigation of charity. Already the benefit 
of his labour is felt more or less in every country; I hope he 
_ will anticipate his final reward by seeing all its effects fully 
realized in his own. He will receive, not by retail, but in 
gross, the reward of those who visit the prisoner; and he has 
so forestalled and monopolized this branch of charity, that 
there will be, I trust, little room to merit by such acts of 
benevolence hereafter. 

Nothing now remains to trouble you with but the fourth 
charge against me,—the business of the Roman Catholics. 
It is a business closely connected with the rest. They are 
all on one and thesame principle. My little scheme of con- 
duct, such as it is, is all arranged. I could do nothing but 
what I have done on this subject, without confounding the 
whole train of my ideas and disturbing the whole order of 
my life. Gentlemen, I ought to apologize to you for seem- 
ing to think anything at all necessary to be said upon this 
matter. The calumny is fitter to be scrawled with the mid- 
night chalk of incendiaries, with ‘‘ No Popery,” on walls and 
doors of devoted houses, than to be mentioned in any civil- 
ized company. I had heard that the spirit of discontent on 
that subject was very prevalent here. With pleasure I find 
that I have been grossly misinformed. If it exists at all in 
this city, the laws have crushed its exertions, and our mor 
als have shamed its appearance in daylight. I have pursued 
this spirit wherever I could trace it; but it still fled from 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 159 


me. It wasa ghost which all had heard of, but none had 
seen. None would acknowledge that he thought the public 
proceeding with regard to our Catholic dissenters to be 
blamable ; but several were sorry it had made an ill impres- 
sion upon others, and that my interest was hurt by my share 
in the business. I find with satisfaction and pride, that not 
above four or five in this city (and I dare say these misled 
by some gross misrepresentation) have signed that symbol 
of delusion and bond of sedition, that libel on the national 
religion and English character, the Protestant Association. 
‘It is, therefore, Gentlemen, not by way of cure, but of pre- 
vention, and lest the arts of wicked men may prevail over 
the integrity of any one amongst us, that I think it neces- 
sary to open to you the merits of this transaction pretty 
much at large; and I beg your patience upon it: for, al- 
though the reasonings that have been used to depreciate the 
act are of little force, and though the authority of the men 
concerned in this ill design is not very imposing, yet the 
audaciousness of these conspirators against the national hon- 
our, and the extensive wickedness of their attempts, have 
raised persons of little importance to a degree of evil emi- 
nence, and imparted a sort of sinister dignity to proceedings 
that had their origin in only the meanest and blindest malice. 

In explaining to you the proceedings of Parliament which 
have been complained of, I will state to you,—first, the 
thing that was done,—next, the persons who did it,—and 
lastly, the grounds and reasons upon which the legislature 
proceeded in this deliberate act of public justice and public 
prudence. 

Gentlemen, the condition of our nature is such that we 
buy our blessings at a price. The Reformation, one of the 
greatest periods of human improvement, was a time of trou- 
ble and confusion. The vast structure of superstition and 
tyranny which had been for ages in rearing, and which was 
combined with the interest of the great and of the many, 
which was moulded into the laws, the manners, and civil in- 
stitutions of nations, and blended with the frame and policy 


160 BURKE - 


of states, could not be brought to the ground without a fear- 
ful struggle ; nor could it fall without a violent concussion 
of itself and all about it. When this great revolution was 
attempted in a more regular mode by government, it was op- 
posed by plots and seditions of the people ; when by popu- 
lar efforts, it was repressed as rebellion by the hand of pow- 
er ; and bloody executions (often bloodily returned) marked 
the whole of its progress through all its stages. The affairs . 
of religion, which are no longer heard of inthe tumult of 

our present contentions, made a principal ingredient in the 

wars and politics of that time: the enthusiasm of religion 

threw a gloom over the politics ; and political interests poi- 

soned and perverted the spirit of religion upon all sides. 

The Protestant religion, in that violent struggle, infected, as 

the Popish had been before, by worldly interests and worldly 

passions, became a persecutor in its turn, sometimes of the 
new sects, which carried their own principles further than it 

was convenient to the original reformers, and always of the 

body from whom they parted: and this persecuting spirit 
arose, not only from the bitterness of retaliation, but from 

the merciless policy of fear. 

It was long before the spirit of true piety and true 
wisdom, involved in the principles of the Reformation, 
could be depurated from the dregs and feculence of the 
contention with which it was carried through. However, 
until this be done, the Reformation is not complete ; and 
those who think themselves good Protestants, from their 
animosity to others, are in that respect no Protestants at all. 
It was at first thought necessary, perhaps, to oppose to Popery 
another Popery, to get the better of it. Whatever was the 
cause, laws were made in many countries, and in this kingdom 
in particular, against Papists, which are as bloody as any of 
those which had been enacted by the Popish princes and> 
states : and where those laws were not bloody, in my opin- 
ion, they were worse ; as they were slow, cruel outrages on™ 
our nature, and kept men alive only to insult in their per- 
sons every one of the rights and feelings of humanity. I 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 161 


pass those statutes, because I would spare your pious ears 
the repetition of such shocking things ; and I come to that 
particular law the repeal of which has produced so many 
unnatural and unexpected consequences. 

A statute was fabricated in the year 1699 by which the 
saying mass (a church service in the Latin tongue, not 
exactly the same as our liturgy, but very near it, and con- 
taining no offence whatsoever against the laws, or against 
good morals) was forged into a crime, punishable with per- 
petual imprisonment. The teaching school, an useful and 
virtuous occupation, even the teaching in a private family, 
was in every Catholic subjected to the same unproportioned 
punishment. Your industry, and the bread of your children, 
was taxed for a pecuniary reward to stimulate avarice to do 
what Nature refused, to inform and prosecute on this law. 
Every Roman Catholic was, under the same act, to forfeit his 
estate to his nearest Protestant relation, until, through a 
profession of what he did not believe, he redeemed by his 
hypocrisy what the law had transferred to the kinsman as 
the recompense of his profligacy. When thus turned out of 
doors from his paternal estate, he was disabled from acquir- 
ing any other by any industry, donation, or charity ; but 
was rendered a foreigner in his native land, only because he 
retained the religion, along with the property, handed down 
to him from those who had been the old inhabitants of that 
land before him. 

Does any one who hears me approve this scheme of things, 
or think there is common justice, common sense, or common 
honesty in any partof it? If any does, let him say it, and I 
am ready to discuss the point with temper and candor. But 
instead of approving, I perceive a virtuous indignation be- 
ginning to rise in your minds on the mere cold stating of 
the statute. 

But what will you feel, when you know from history how 
this statute passed, and what were the motives, and what 
the mode of making it? A party in this nation, enemies to 


the system of the Revolution, were in opposition to the 
If 


162 BURKE 


government of King William. They knew that our glorious 
deliverer was an enemy to all persecution. They knew that 
he came to free us from slavery and Popery, out of a country 
where a third of the people are contented Catholics under a 
Protestant government. He came with a part of his army 
composed of those very Catholics, to overset the power of a 
Popish prince. Such is the effect of a tolerating spirit; and 
so much is liberty served in every way, and by all persons, 
by a manly adherenceto its own principles. Whilst freedom 
is true to itself, everything becomes subject to it, and its very 
adversaries are an instrument in its hands. 

The party I speak of (like some amongst us who would dis- 
parage the best friends of their country) resolved to make 
the king either violate his principles of toleration or incur 
the odium of protecting Papists. They therefore brought 
in this bill, and made it purposely wicked and absurd that it 
might be rejected. Thethen court party, discovering their 
game, turned the tables on them, and returned their bill to 
them stuffed with still greater absurdities, that its loss might 
lie upon its original authors. They, finding their own ball 
thrown back to them, kicked it back again to their adver- 
saries. And thus this act, loaded with the double injustice 
of two parties, neither of whom intended to pass what they 
hoped the other would be persuaded to reject, went through 
the legislature, contrary to the real wish of all parts of it, 
and of all the parties that composed it. In this manner 
these insolent and profligate factions, as if they were play- 
ing with balls and counters, made a sport of the fortunes 
and the liberties of their fellow-creatures. Other acts of 
persecution have been acts of malice. This was a subversion 
of justice from wantonness and petulance. Lookinto the his- 
tory of Bishop Burnet. He is a witness without exception. 

The effects of the act have been as mischievous as its 
origin was ludicrous and shameful. From that time, every 
person of that communion, lay and ecclesiastic, has been 
obliged to fly from the face of day. The clergy, concealed 
in garrets of private houses, or obliged to take a shelter 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 163 


(hardly safe to themselves, but infinitely dangerous to their 
country) under the privileges of foreign ministers, officiated 
as their servants and under their protection. The whole 
body of the Catholics, condemned to beggary and to igno- 
rance in their native land, have been obliged to learn the 
principles of letters, at the hazard of all their other princi- 
ples, from the charity of your enemies. They have been 
taxed to their ruin at the pleasure of necessitous and profli- 
gate relations, and according to the measure of their neces- 
sity and profligacy. Examples of this are many and affect- 
ing. Some of them are known by a friend who stands near 
me inthis hall. It is but six or seven years since a clergy- 
man, of the name of Malony, a man of morals, neither 
guilty nor accused of anything noxious to the state, was 
condemned to perpetual imprisonment for exercising the 
functions of his religion; and after lying in jail two or three 
years, was relieved by the mercy of government from per- 
petual imprisonment, on condition of perpetual banishment. 
A brother of the Earl of Shrewsbury, a Talbot, a name 
respectable in this country whilst its glory is any part of its 
concern, was hauled to the bar of the Old Bailey, among 
common felons, and only escaped the same doom, either by 
some error in the process, or that the wretch who brought 
him there could not correctly describe his person,—I now 
forget which. In short, the persecution would never have 
relented for a moment, if the judges, superseding (though 
with an ambiguous example) the strict rule of their artificial 
duty by the higher obligation of their conscience, did not 
constantly throw every difficulty in the way of such infor- 
mers. But so ineffectual is the power of legal evasion 
against legal iniquity, that it was but the other day that a 
lady of condition, beyond the middle of life, was on the point 
of being stripped of her whole fortune by a near relation to 
whom she had been a friend and benefactor; and she must 
have been totally ruined, without a power of redress or 
mitigation from the courts of law, had not the legislature 
itself rushed in, and by a special act of Parliament rescued 


164 BURKE 


her from the injustice of its own statutes. One of the acts 
authorizing such things was that which we in part repealed, 
knowing what our duty was, and doing that duty as men of 
honour and virtue, as good Protestants, and as good citizens. 
Let him stand forth that disapproves what we have done ! 

Gentlemen, bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny. In 
such a country as this they are of all bad things the worst,— 
worse by far than anywhere else; and they derive a particu- 
lar malignity even from the wisdom and soundness of the 
rest of our institutions. For very obvious reasons you can 
not trust the crown with a dispensing power over any of 
your laws. However, a government, be it as bad as it may, 
will, in the exercise of a discretionary power, discriminate 
times and persons, and will not ordinarily pursue any man, 
when its own safety is not concerned. A mercenary informer 
knows no distinction. Under such a system, the obnoxious 
people are slaves not only to the government, but they live 
at the mercy of every individual; they are at once the 
slaves of the whole community and of every part of it; and 
the worst and most unmerciful men are those on whose 
goodness they most depend. 

In this situation, men not only shrink from the frowns of 
a stern magistrate, but they are obliged to fly from their very 
species. The seeds of destruction are sown in civil inter- 
course, in social habitudes. The blood of wholesome kindred 
is infected. Their tables and beds are surrounded with 
snares. All the means given by Providence to make life 
safe and comfortable are perverted into instruments of terror 
and torment. This species of universal subserviency, that 
makes the very servant who waits behind your chair the 
arbiter of your life and fortune, has such a tendency to de- 
grade and abase mankind, and to deprive them of that 
assured and liberal state of mind which alone can make us 
what we ought to be, that I vow to God I would sooner 
bring myself to put a man to immediate death for opinions 
I disliked, and so to get rid of the man and his opinions at 
once, than to fret him with a feverish being, tainted with 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 165 


the jail-distemper of a contagious servitude, to keep him 
above ground an animated mass of putrefaction, corrupted 
himself, and corrupting all about him. 

The act repealed was of this direct tendency; and it was 
made in the manner which I have related to you. I will 
now tell you by whom the bill of repeal was brought into 
Parliament. I find it has been industriously given out in 
this city (from kindness to me, unquestionably) that I was the 
mover or the seconder. The fact is, I did not once open 
my lips on the subject during the whole progress of the bill. 
I do not say this as disclaiming my share in that measure. 
Very far from it. I inform you of this fact, lest I should 
seem to arrogate to myself the merits which belong to others. 
To have been the man chosen out to redeem our fellow- 
citizens from slavery, to purify our laws from absurdity and 
injustice, and to cleanse our religion from the blot and stain 
of persecution, would bean honour and happiness to which 
my wishes would undoubtedly aspire, but to which nothing 
but my wishes could possibly have entitled me. That great 
work was in hands in every respect far better qualified than 
mine. The mover of the bill was Sir George Savile. 

When an act of great and signal humanity was to be done, 
and done with all the weight and authority that belonged to 
it, the world could cast its eyes upon none but him. I hope 
that few things which have a tendency to bless or to adorn 
life have wholly escaped my observation in my passage 
through it. I have sought the acquaintance of that gentle- 
man, and have seen him in all situations. He its a true 
genius; with an understanding vigorous, and acute, and re- 
fined, and distinguishing even to excess; and illuminated 
with a most unbounded, peculiar, and original cast of imagina- 
tion. With these he possesses many external and instru- 
mental advantages; and he makes use of them all. His 
fortune is among the largest,—a fortune which, wholly un- 
incumbered as it is with one single charge from luxury, 
vanity, or excess, sinks under the benevolence of its dis- 
penser. This private benevolence, expanding itself into 


166 BURKE 


patriotism, renders his whole being the estate of the public, 
in which he has not reserved a peculium for himself of profit, 
diversion, or relaxation. During the session the first in and 
the last out of the House of Commons, he passes from the 
senate to the camp; and seldom seeing the seat of his an- 
cestors, he is always in Parliament to serve his country or in 
the field to defend it. But in all well-wrought compositions 
some particulars stand out more eminently than the rest ; and 
the things which will carry his name to posterity are his two 
bills: I mean that for a limitation of the claims of the crown 
upon landed estates, and this for the relief of the Roman 
Catholics. By the former he has emancipated property; by 
the latter he has quieted conscience; and by both he has 
taught that grand lesson to government and subject,—no 
longer to regard each other as adverse parties. 

Such was the mover of the act that is complained of by 
men who are not quite so good as he is,—an act most assur- 
edly not brought in by him from any partiality to that sect 
which is the object of it. For among his faults I really 
can not help reckoning a greater degree of prejudice against 
that people than becomes so wise a man. I know that he | 
inclines to a sort of disgust, mixed with a considerable 
degree of asperity, to the system; and he has few, or rather 
no habits with any of its professors. What he has done was 
on quite other motives. The motives were these, which he 
declared in his excellent speech on his motion for the bill: 
namely, his extreme zeal to the Protestant religion, which 
he thought utterly disgraced by the act of 1699; and his 
rooted hatred to all kind of oppression, under any colour, or 
upon any pretence whatsoever. 

The seconder was worthy of the mover and the motion. I 
was not the seconder; it was Mr. Dunning, recorder of this 
city. I shall say the less of him because his near relation to 
you makes you more particularly acquainted with his merits, 
But I should appear little acquainted with them, or little 
sensible of them, if I could utter his name on this occasion 
without expressing my esteem for his character. I am not 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 167 


afraid of offending a most learned body, and most jealous of 
its reputation for that learning, when I say he is the first of 
his profession. It is a point settled by those who settle 
everything else; and I must add (what I am enabled to say 
from my own long and close observation) that there is not a 
man, of any profession, or in any situation, of a more erect 
~ and independent spirit, of a more proud honour, a more manly 
mind, a more firm and determined integrity. Assure your- 
selves, that the names of two such men will bear a great load 
of prejudice in the other scale before they can be entirely 
outweighed. 

With this mover and this seconder agreed the whole House 
of Commons, the whole House of Lords, the whole Bench of 
Bishops, the king, the ministry, the opposition, all the dis- 
tinguished clergy of the Establishment, all the eminent 
lights (for they were consulted) of the dissenting churches. 
This according voice of national wisdom ought to be listened 
to with reverence. To say that all these descriptions of 
Englishmen unanimously concurred in a scheme for 
introducing the Catholic religion, or that none of them 
understood the nature and effects of what they were doing so 
well as a few obscure clubs of people whose names you never 
heard of, is shamelessly absurd. Surely it is paying a miser- 
able compliment to the religion we profess, to suggest that 
everything eminent in the kingdom 1s indifferent or even ad- 
verse to that religion, and that its security is wholly aban- 
doned to the zeal of those who have nothing but their zeal 
to distinguish them. In weighing this unanimous concur- 
rence of whatever the nation has to boast of, I hope you 
will recollect that all these concurring parties do by no 
means love one another enough to agree in any point which 
was not both evidently and importantly right. 

To prove this, to prove that the measure was both clearly 
and materially proper, I will next lay before you (as I 
promised) the political grounds and reasons for the repeal of 
that penal statute, and the motives to its repeal at that par- 
ticular time. 


168 BURKE 


Gentlemen, America——When the English nation seemed 
to be dangerously, if not irrecoverably divided,—when one, 
and that the most growing branch, was torn from the parent 
stock, and ingrafted on the power of France,a great terror 
fell upon this kingdom. On a sudden we awakened from 
our dreams of conquest, and saw ourselves threatened with 
an immediate invasion, which we were at that time very ill 
prepared to resist. You remember the cloud that gloomed 
over usall. In that hour of our dismay, from the bottom 
of the hiding-places into which the indiscriminate rigour of 
our statutes had driven them, came out the body of the 
Roman Catholics. They appeared before the steps of a 
tottering throne, with one of the most sober, measured, 
steady, and dutiful addresses that was ever presented to the 
crown. It wasno holiday ceremony, no anniversary compli- 
ment of parade and show. It was signed by almost every 
gentleman of that persuasion, of note or property, in Eng- 
land. At such a crisis, nothing but a decided resolution to 
stand or fall with their country could have dictated such 
an address, the direct tendency of which was to cut off all 
retreat, and to render them peculiarly obnoxious to an in- 
vader of their own communion. The address showed what 
I long languished to see, that all the subjects of England had 
cast off all foreign views and connections, and that every, 
man looked for his relief from every grievance at the hands 
only of his own natural government. 

It was necessary, on our part, that the natural government 
should show itself worthy of that name. It was necessary, 
at the crisis I speak of, that the supreme power of the state 
should meet the conciliatory dispositions of the subject. Tode- 
lay protection would be to reject allegiance. And why should 
it be rejected, or even coldly and suspiciously received? If 
any independent Catholic state should choose to take part 
with this kingdom in a war with France and Spain, that bigot 
(if such a bigot could be found) would be heard with little 
respect, who could dream of objecting his religion to an ally 
whom the nation would not only receive with its freest 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 169 


thanks, but purchase with the last remains of its exhausted 
treasure. To such an ally we should not dare to whisper a 
single syllable of those base and invidious topics upon which 
some unhappy men would persuade the state to reject the 
duty and allegiance of its own members. Is it, then, because 
foreigners are in a condition to set our malice at defiance, 
‘that with them we are willing to contract engagements of 
friendship, and to keep them with fidelity and honour, but 
that, because we conceive some descriptions of our country- 
men are not powerful enough to punish our malignity, we 
will not permit them to support our common interest ? Is 
it on that ground that our anger is to-be kindled by their 
offered kindness? Is it on that ground that they are to be 
subjected to penalties, because they are willing by actual 
merit to purge themselves from imputed crimes? Lest by 
an adherence to the cause of their country they should acquire 
a title to fair and equitable treatment, are we resolved to 
furnish them with causes of eternal enmity, and rather supply 
them with just and founded motives to disaffection than not 
to have that disaffection in existence to justify an oppression 
which, not from policy, but disposition, we have predeter- 
mined to exercise? 
What shadow of reason could be assigned, why, at a time 
‘when the most Protestant part of this Protestant empire 
found it for its advantage to unite with the two principal 
Popish states, to unite itself in the closest bonds with France 
and Spain, for our destruction, that we should refuse to unite 
with our own Catholic countrymen for our own preservation ? 
Ought we, like madmen, to tear off the plasters that the 
lenient hand of prudence had spread over the wounds and 
gashes which in our delirium of ambition we had given to 
our own body? No person ever reprobated the American 
war more than I did, and do, and ever shall. But I never 
will consent that we should lay additional, voluntary penal- 
ties on ourselves, for a fault which carries but too much of 
its own punishment in its own nature. For one, I was de- 
lighted with the proposal of internal peace. I accepted the 


170 BURKE 


blessing with thankfulness and transport. I was truly happy 
to find one good effect of our civil distractions: that they 
had put an end to all religious strife and heart-burning in 
our own bowels. What must be the sentiments of a man 
who would wish to perpetuate domestic hostility when the 
causes of dispute are at an end, and who, crying out for 
peace with one part of the nation on the most humiliating 
terms, should deny it to those who offer friendship without 
any terms at all? 

But if I was unable to reconcile such a denial to the con- 
tracted principles of local duty, what answer could I give to 
the broad claims of general humanity? I confess to you 
freely, that the sufferings and distresses of the people of 
America in this cruel war have at times affected me more 
deeply than I can express. I felt every gazette of triumph 
as a blow upon my heart, which has an hundred times sunk 
and fainted within me at all the mischiefs brought upon 
those who bear the whole brunt of war in the heart of their 
country. Yet the Americans are utter strangers to me; a 
nation among whom I am not sure that I have a single ac- 
quaintance. Was I to suffer my mind to be so unaccount- 
ably warped, was I to keep such iniquitous weights and 
measures of temper and of reason, as to sympathize with | 
those who are in open rebellion against an authority which 
I respect, at war with a country which by every title ought 
to be, and is, most dear to me,—and yet to have no feeling 
at all for the hardships and indignities suffered by men who 
by their very vicinity are bound upina nearer relation to us, 
who contribute their share, and more than their share, to 
the common prosperity, who perform the common offices of 
social life, and who obey the laws, to the full as well as I do? 
Gentlemen, the danger to the state being out of the ques- 
tion (of which, let me tell you, statesmen themselves are 
apt to have but too exquisite a sense), I could assign no one 
reason of justice, policy, or feeling, for not concurring most 
cordially, as most cordially I did concur, in softening some 


” 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 17! 


part of that shameful servitude under which several of my 
worthy fellow-citizens were groaning. 

Important effects followed this act of wisdom. They ap- 
peared at home and abroad, to the great benefit of this king- 
dom, and, let me hope, to the advantage of mankind at large. 
It betokened union among ourselves. It showed soundness, 
even on the part of the persecuted, which generally is the 
weak side of every community. But its most essential 
operation was not in England. The act was immediately, 
though very imperfectly, copied in Ireland; and this imper- 
fect transcript of an imperfect act, this first faint sketch of 
toleration, which did little more than disclose a principle and 
mark out a disposition, completed in a most wonderful manner 
the reunion to the state of all the Catholics of that country. 
It made us what we ought alwaysto have been, one family, 
one body, one heart and soul, against the family combina- 
tion and all other combinations of our enemies. We have, 
indeed, obligations to that people, who received such small 
benefits with so much gratitude, and for which gratitude 
and attachment to us Iam afraid they have suffered not a 
little in other places. 

I dare say you have all heard of the privileges indulged to 
the Irish Catholics residing in Spain. You have likewise 
heard with what circumstances of severity they have been 
lately expelled from the seaports of that kingdom, driven 
into the inland cities, and there detained as a sort of pris- 
oners of state. I have good reason to believe that it was 
the zeal to our government and our cause (somewhat indis- 
creetly expressed in one of the addresses of the Catholics of 
Ireland) which has thus drawn down on their heads the in- 
dignation of the court of Madrid, to the inexpressible loss 
of several individuals, and, in future, perhaps. to the great 
detriment of the whole of their body. Now that our people 
should be persecuted in Spain for their attachment to this 
country, and persecuted in this country for their supposed 
enmity to us, is such a jarring reconciliation of contradic- 
tory distresses, is a thing at once so dreadful and ridiculous, 


172 BURKE 


that no malice short of diabolical would wish to continue 
any human creatures in such a situation. But honest men 
will not forget either their merit or their sufferings. There 
are men (and many, I trust, there are) who, out of love to 
their country and their kind, would torture their invention 
to find excuses for the mistakes of their brethren, and who, 
to stifle dissension, would construe even doubtful appear. 
ances with the utmost favour: such men will never persuade 
themselves to be ingenious and refined in discovering dis-.. 
affection and treason in the manifest, palpable signs of 
suffering loyalty. Persecution is so unnatural to them, that 
they gladly snatch the very first opportunity of laying aside 
all the tricks and devices of penal politics, and of returning 
home, after all their irksome and vexatious wanderings, to 
our natural family mansion, to the grand social principle 
that unites all men, in all descriptions, under the shadow of 
an equal and impartial justice. 

Men of another sort, I mean the bigoted enemies to 
liberty, may, perhaps, in their politics, make no account of 
the good or ill affection of the Catholics of England, who 
are but an handful of people (enough to torment, but not 
enough to fear), perhaps not so many, of both sexes and of 
all ages, as fifty thousand. But, Gentlemen, it is possible 
you may not know that the people of that persuasion in 
Ireland amount at least to sixteen or seventeen hundred 
thousand souls. I do not at all exaggerate the number. A 
nation to be persecuted! Whilst we were masters of the sea, 
embodied with America, and in alliance with half the powers 
of the Continent, we might, perhaps, in that remote corner’ 
of Europe, afford to tyrannize with impunity. But there is 
a revolution in our affairs, which makes it prudent to be just. 
In our late awkward contest with Ireland about trade, had 
religion been thrown in, to ferment and embitter the mass 
of discontents, the consequences might have been truly 
dreadful. But, very happily, that cause of quarrel was 
previously quieted by the wisdom of the acts I am com- 
mending. 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 173 


Even in England, where I admit the danger from the dis- 
content of that persuasion to be less than in Ireland, yet 
even here, had we listened to the counsels of fanaticism and 
folly, we might have wounded ourselves very deeply, and 
wounded ourselves in a very tender part. You are apprised 
that the Catholics of England consist mostly of our best 
manufacturers. Had the legislature chosen, instead of re- 
turning their declarations of duty with correspondent good- 
will, to drive them to despair, there isa country at their very 
door to which they would be invited,—a country in all re- 
spects as good as ours, and with the finest cities in the world 
ready built to receive them. And thus the bigotry of a free 
country, and in an enlightened age, would have repeopled 
the cities of Flanders, which, in the darkness of two hundred 
years ago, had been desolated: by the superstition of a cruel 
tyrant. Our manufactures were the growth of the persecu- 
tions in the Low Countries. What a spectacle would it be 
to Europe, to see us at this time of day balancing the account 
of tyranny with those very countries, and by our persecu- 
tions driving back trade and manufacture, as a sort of vaga- 
bonds, to their original settlement! But I trust we shall be 
saved this last of disgraces. 

So far as to the effect of the act on the interests of this 
nation. With regard to the interests of mankind at large, I 
am sure the benefit was very considerable. Long before this 
act, indeed, the spirit of toleration began to gain ground in 
Europe. In Holland the third part of the people are Cath- 
olics; they live at ease, and are a sound part of the state. 
In many parts of Germany, Protestants and Papists partake 
the same cities, the same councils, and even the same chur- 
ches. The unbounded liberality of the king of Prussia’s 
conduct on this occasion is known to all the world; and it is 
of a piece with the other grand maxims of his reign. The 
magnanimity of the Imperial court, breaking through the 
narrow principles of its predecessors, has indulged its Pro- 
testant subjects, not only with property, with worship, with 
liberal education, but with honours and trusts, both civil and 


174 BURKE 


military. A worthy Protestant gentleman of this country 
now fills, and fills with credit, an high office in the Austrian 
Netherlands. Even the Lutheran obstinacy of Sweden has 
thawed at length, and opened a toleration to all religions. 
I know, myself, that in France the Protestants begin to be 
at rest. The army, which in that country is everything, is 
open to them; and some of the military rewards and deco- 
rations which the laws deny are supplied by others, to make 
the service acceptable and honourable. The first minister of 
finance in that country is a Protestant. Two years’ war 
without a tax is among the first fruits of their liberality. 
Tarnished as the glory of this nation is, and far as it has 
waded into the shades of an eclipse, some beams of its former 
illumination still play upon its surface; and what is done in 
England is still looked to, as argument, and as example. 
It is certainly true, that no law of this country ever met 
with such universal applause abroad, or was so likely to 
produce the perfection of that tolerating spirit which, as I 
observed, has been long gaining ground in Europe: for 
abroad it was universally thought that we had done what I 
am sorry to say we had not; they thought we had granted 
a full toleration. That opinion was, however, so far from 
hurting the Protestant cause, that I declare, with the most 
serious solemnity, my firm belief that-no one thing done for 
these fifty years past was so likely to prove deeply beneficial 
to our religion at large as. Sir George Savile’s act. In its 
effects it was “‘an act for tolerating and protecting Protestan- 
tism throughout Europe’’; and I hope that those who were 
taking steps for the quiet and settlement of our Protestant 
brethren in other countries will, even yet, rather consider the 
steady equity of the greater and better part of the people of 
Great Britain than the vanity and violence of a few. 

I perceive, Gentlemen, by the manner of all about me, 
that you look with horror on the wicked clamor which has 
been raised on this subject, and that, instead of an apology 
for what was done, you rather demand from me an account, 
why the execution of the scheme of toleration was not made 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 175 


more answerable to the large and liberal grounds on which 
it was taken up. The question is natural and proper; and 
I remember that a great and learned magistrate,? distin- 
guished for his strong and systematic understanding, and 
who at that time was a member of the House of Commons, 
made the same objection to the proceeding. The statutes, 
as they now stand, are, without doubt, perfectly absurd. 
But I beg leave to explain the cause of this gross imperfec- 
tion in the tolerating plan, as well and as shortly as I am 
able. It was universally thought that the session ought not 
to pass over without doing something in this business. To 
revise the whole body of the penal statutes was conceived 
to be an object too big for the time. The penal statute, 
therefore, which was chosen for repeal (chosen to show our 
disposition to conciliate, not to perfect a toleration) was 
this act of ludicrous cruelty of which I have just given you 
the history. It is an act which, though not by a great deal 
so fierce and bloody as some of the rest, was infinitely more 
ready in the execution. It was the act which gave the 
greatest encouragement to those pests of society, mercenary 
informers and interested disturbers of household peace; and 
it was observed with truth, that the prosecutions, either 
carried to conviction or compounded, for many years, had 
been all commenced upon that act. It was said, that, whilst 
we were deliberating on a more perfect scheme, the spirit of 
the age would never come up to the execution of the statutes 
which remained, especially as more steps, and a co-operation 
of more minds and powers, were required towards a mis- 
chievous use of them, than for the execution of the act to be 
repealed: that it was better to unravel this texture from 
below than from above, beginning with the latest, which, in 
general practise, is the severest evil. It was alleged, that 
this slow proceeding would be attended with the advantage 
of a progressive experience,—and that the people would 
grow reconciled to toleration, when they should find, by the 
effects, that justice was not so irreconcilable an enemy to 
convenience as they had imagined. 


176 BURKE 


These, Gentlemen, were the reasons why we left this good 
work in the rude, unfinished state in which good works are 
commonly left, through the tame circumspection with which 
a timid prudence so frequently enervates beneficence. In 
doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish, 
and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But 
the works of malice and injustice are quite in another style. 
They are finished with a bold, masterly hand, touched as 
they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that 
call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute. 

Thus this matter was left for the time, with a full deter- 
mination in Parliament not to suffer other and worse statutes 
to remain for the purpose of counteracting the benefits pro- 
posed by the repeal of one penal law: for nobody then 
dreamed of defending what was done as a benefit, on the 
eround of its being no benefit at all. We were not then ripe 
for so mean a subterfuge. 

I do not wish to go over the horrid scene that was after- 
wards acted. Would to God it could be expunged forever 
from the annals of this country! But since it must subsist 
for our shame, let it subsist for our instruction. In the year 
1780 there were found in this nation men deluded enough, 
(for I give the whole to their delusion,) on pretenses of zeal 
and piety, without any sort of provocation whatsoever, real 
or pretended, to make a desperate attempt, which would 
have consumed all the glory and power of this country in 
the flames of London, and buried all law, order, and religion 
under the ruins of the metropolis of the Protestant world. 
Whether all this mischief done, or in the direct train of 
doing, was in their original scheme, I cannot say; I hope it 
was not: but this would have been the unavoidable conse- 
quence of their proceedings, had not the flames they had 
lighted up in their fury been extinguished in their blood. 

All the time that this horrid scene was acting, or aveng- 
ing, as well as for some time before, and ever since, the 
wicked instigators of this unhappy multitude, guilty, with 
every aggravation, of all their crimes, and screened in a cow- 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 177 


ardly darkness from their punishment, continued, without 
interruption, pity, or remorse, to blow up the blind rage of 
the populace with a continued blast of pestilential libels, 
which infected and poisoned the very air we breathed in. 
The main drift of all the libels and all the riots was, to 
force Parliament (to persuade us was hopeless) into an act of 
national perfidy which has no example. For, Gentlemen, it 
is proper you should all know what infamy we escaped by 
refusing that repeal, for a refusal of which, it seems, I, among 
others, stand somewhere or other accused. When we took 
away, on the motives which I had the honour of stating to 
you, a few of the innumerable penalties upon an oppressed 
and injured people, the relief was not absolute, but given on 
a stipulation and compact between them and us: for we 
bound down the Roman Catholics with the most solemn 
oaths to bear true allegiance to this government, to abjure all 
sort of temporal power in any other, and to renounce, under 
the same solemn obligations, the doctrines of systematic per- 
- fidy with which they stood (I conceive very unjustly) charged. 
Now our modest petitioners came up to us, most humbly 
praying nothing more than that we should break our faith, 
without any one cause whatsoever of forfeiture assigned; 
and when the subjects of this kingdom had, on their part, 
fully performed their engagement, we should refuse, on our 
part, the benefit we had stipulated on the performance of 
those very conditions that were prescribed by our own 
authority, and taken on the sanction of our public faith: 
that is to say, when we had inveigled them with fair prom- 
ises within our door, we were to shut it on them, and, 
adding mockery to outrage, to tell them,—“ Now we have 
got you fast: your consciences are bound toa power resolved 
on your destruction. We have made you swear that your © 
religion obliges you to keep your faith: fools as you are! 
_we will now let you see that our religion enjoins us to keep 
no faith with you.” They who would advisedly call upon us 
to do such things must certainly have thought us not only a. 


convention of treacherous tyrants, but a gang of the lowest 
12 


178 - BURKE 


and dirtiest wretches that ever disgraced humanity. Had we 
done this, we should have indeed proved that there were some 
in the world whom no faith could bind; and we should have 
convicted ourselves of that odious principle of which Papists 
stood accused by those very savages who wished us, on that 
accusation, to deliver them over to their fury. 

In this audacious tumult, when our very name and char- 
acter as gentlemen was to be cancelled forever, along with 
the faith and honour of the nation, I, who had exerted my- 
self very little on the quiet passing of the bill, thought it 
necessary then to come forward. I was not alone; but 
though some distinguished members on all sides, and par- 
ticularly on ours, added much to their high reputation by 
the part they took on that day (a part which will be remem- 
bered as long ashonour, spirit, and eloquence have estima- 
tion in the world), I may and will value myself so far, that 
yielding in abilities to many, I yielded in zeal to none. 
With warmth and with vigour, and animated with a just and 
natural indignation, I called forth every faculty that I pos- 
sessed, and I directed it in every way in which I could pos- 
sibly employ it. I laboured night and day. I laboured in 
Parliament ; [laboured out of Parliament. If, therefore, the 
resolution of the House of Commons, refusing to commit 
this act of unmatched turpitude, be a crime, I am guilty 
among the foremost. But, indeed, whatever the faults of 
that House may have been, no one member was found hardy 
enough to propose so infamous a thing; and on full debate 
we passed the resolution against the petitions with as much 
unanimity as we had formerly passed the law of which these 
petitions demanded the repeal. 

There was a circumstance (justice will not suffer me to pass 
it over) which, if anything could enforce the reasons I 
have given, would fully justify the act of relief, and render a 
repeal, or anything like a repeal, unnatural, impossible. It 
was the behaviour of the persecuted Roman Catholics under 
the acts of violence and brutal insolence which they suffered. 
I suppose there are not in London less than four or five thou- 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 179 


sand of that persuasion from mycountry, who do a great 
deal of the most laborious works in the metropolis; and 
they chiefly inhabit those quarters which were the principal 
theater of the fury of the bigoted multitude. They are 
known to be men of strong arms and quick feelings, and more 
remarkable for a determined resolution than clear ideas or 
much foresight. But, though provoked by everything that 
can stir the blood of men, their houses and chapels in flames, 
and with the most atrocious profanations of everything which 
they hold sacred before their eyes, not a hand was moved to 
retaliate, or even to defend. Had aconflict once begun, the 
rage of their persecutors would have redoubled. Thus fury 
increasing by the reverberation of outrages, house being 
fired for house, and church for chapel, Iam convinced that no 
power under heaven could have prevented a general con- 
flagration, and at this day London would have been a tale. 
But I am well informed, and the thing speaks it, that 
their clergy exerted their whole influence to keep their 
people in such a state of forbearance and quiet, as, when I 
look back, fills me with astonishment,—but not with as- 
tonishment only. Their merits on that occasion ought not 
to be forgotten; nor will they, when Englishmen come to 
recollect themselves. I am sure it were far more proper 
to have called them forth, and given them the thanks of 
both Houses of Parliament, than to have suffered those 
_ worthy clergymen and excellent citizens to be hunted into 
holes and corners, whilst we are making low-minded inquisi- 
tions into the number of their people; as if a tolerating 
principle was never to prevail, unless we were very sure that 
only a few could possibly take advantage of it. But, indeed, 
we are not yet well recovered of our fright. Our reason, I 
trust, will return with our security, and this unfortunate 
temper will pass over like a cloud. 

Gentlemen, I have now laid before you a few of the 
reasons for taking away the penalties of the act of 1699, and 
for refusing to establish them on the riotous requisition of 
1780. Because I would not suffer anything which may be 


180 | BURKE 


for your satisfaction to escape, permit me just to touch on 
the objections urged against our act and our resolves, and 
intended as a justification of the violence offered to both 
Houses. “ Parliament,” they assert, “ was too hasty, and 
they ought, in so essential and alarming a change, to have 
proceeded with a far greater degree of deliberation.” The 
direct contrary. Parliament wastoo slow. They took four- 
score years to deliberate on the repeal of an act which ought 
not to have survived a second session. When at length, 
after a procrastination of near a century, the business was 
taken up, it proceeded in the most public manner, by the 
ordinary stages, and as slowly as a law so evidently right as 
to be resisted by none would naturally advance. Had it 
been read three times in one day, we should have shown 
only a becoming readiness to recognize, by protection, the 
undoubted dutiful behaviour of those whom we had but too 
long punished for offences of presumption or conjecture. 
But for what end was that billto linger beyond the usual 
period of an unopposed measure? Was it to be delayed 
until a rabble in Edinburgh should dictate to the Church of 
England what measure of persecution was fitting for her 
safety? Was it to be adjourned until a fanatical force could 
be collected in London, sufficient to frighten us out of all 
our ideas of policy and justice? Were we to wait for the 
profound lectures on the reason of state, ecclesiastical and 
political, which the Protestant Association have since con- 
descended to read to us? Or were we, seven hundred peers 
and commoners, the only persons ignorant of the ribald in- 
vectives which occupy the place of argument in those remon- 
strances, which every man of common observation had heard 
a thousand times over, and a thousand times over had de- 
spised? All men had before heard what they have to say, 
and all men at this day know what they dare to do; and I 
trust all honest men are equally influenced by the one and 
by the other. 

But they tell us, that those our fellow-citizens whose 
chains we have a little relaxed are enemies to liberty and 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 181 


our free Constitution.—Not enemies, I presume, to their 
own liberty. And as to the Constitution, until we give 
them some share in it, I do not know on what pretense we 
can examine into their opinions about a business in which 
they have no interest or concern. But, after all, are we 
equally sure that they are adverse to our Constitution as 
that our statutes are hostile and destructive to them? For 
my part, I have reason to believe their opinions and inclina- 
tions in that respect are various, exactly like those of other 
men ; and if they lean more to the crown than I and than 
many of you think we ought, we must remember that he 
who aims at another’s life is not to be surprised, if he flies 
into any sanctuary that will receive him. The tenderness of 
the executive power is the natural asylum of those upon 
whom the laws have declared war; and to complain that 
men are inclined to favour the means of their own safety is 
so absurd, that one forgets the injustice in the ridicule. 

I must fairly tell you, that so far as my principles are con- 
cerned (principles that I hope will only depart with my last 
breath,) that I have no idea of a liberty unconnected with 
honesty and justice. Nor do I believe that any good con- 
stitutions of government, or of freedom, can find it necessary 
for their security to doom any part of the people to a per- 
manent slavery.’ Such a constitution of freedom, if such can 
be, is in effect no more than another name for the tyranny 
of thestrongest faction; and factions in republics have been, 
and are, full as capable as monarchs of the most cruel oppres- 
sion and injustice. It is but too true, that the love, and even 
the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely rare. It is but 
too true that there are many whose whole scheme of freedom 
is made up of pride, perverseness, and insolence. They feel 
themselves in a state of thraldom, they imagine that their 
souls are cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man 
‘or some body of men dependent on their mercy. This de- 
sire of having some one below them descends to those who are 
the very lowest of all ; and a Protestant cobbler, debased by 
his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling church, 


182 BURKE 


feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that 
the peer whose footman’s instep he measures is able to 
keep his chaplain from a jail. This disposition is the true 
source of the passion which many men in very humble life 
have taken to the American war. Our subjects in America ; 
our colonies ; our dependants. This lust of party power is 
the liberty they hunger and thirst for; and this Siren song 
of ambition has charmed ears that one would have thought 
were never organized to that sort of music. 

This way of proscribing the citizens by denominations and 
general descriptions, dignified by the name of reason of 
state, and security for constitutions and commonwealths, is 
nothing better at bottom than the miserable invention of an 
ungenerous ambition which would fain hold the sacred trust 
of power, without any of the virtues or any of the energies 
that give a title to it,—a receipt of policy, made up of a de- 
testable compound of malice, cowardice, and sloth. They 
would govern men against their will ; but in that govern- 
ment they would be discharged from the exercise of vigilance, 
providence, and fortitude ; and therefore, that they may 
sleep on their watch, they consent to take some one division 
of the society into partnership of the tyranny over the rest. 
But let government, in what form it may be, comprehend 
the whole in its justice, and restrain the suspicious-by its 
vigilance,—let it keep watch and ward,—let it discover by its 
sagacity, and punish by its firmness, all delinquency against 
its power, whenever delinquency exists in the overt acts, 
—and then it will be as safe as ever God and Nature intended 
it should be. Crimes are the acts of individuals, and not of 
denominations: and therefore arbitrarily to class men 
under general descriptions, in order to proscribe and punish 
them in the lump for a presumed delinquency, of which per- 
haps but a part, perhaps none at all, are guilty, is indeed a 
compendious method, and saves a world of trouble about 
proof; but such a method, instead of being law, is an act 
of unnatural rebellion against the legal dominion of reason 
and justice; and this vice, in any constitution that en- 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 183 


tertains it, at one time or other will certainly bring on its 
ruin. 

We are told that this is not a religious persecution ; and 
its abettors are loud in disclaiming all severities on account 
of conscience. Very fine indeed! Then let it be so: they 
are not persecutors ; they are only tyrants. With all my 
heart. Iam perfectly indifferent concerning the pretexts 
upon which we torment one another,—or.whether it be for 
the constitution of the Church of England, or for the con- 
stitution of the State of England, that people choose 
to make their fellow-creatures wretched. When we 
were sent into a place of authority, you that sent us had 
yourselves but one commission to give. You could give us 
none to wrong or oppress, or even to suffer any kind of op- 
pression or wrong, on any grounds whatsoever : not on po- 
litical, as in the affairs of America; not on commercial, as in 
those of Ireland ; not in civil, as in the laws for debt ; not 
in religious, as in the statutes against Protestant or Catholic 
. dissenters. The diversified, but connected, fabric of uni- 
versal justice is well cramped and bolted together in all its 
parts ; and depend upon it, 1 never have employed, and I 
never shall employ, any engine of power which may come 
into my hands to wrench it asunder. All shall stand, if I can 
help it, and all shall stand connected. After all, to complete 
this work, much remains to be done: much in the East, 
much in the West. But, great as the work is, if our will be 
ready, our powers are not deficient. 

Since you have suffered me to trouble you so much on 
this subject, permit me, Gentlemen, to detain you a little 
longer. I am, indeed, most solicitous to give you perfect 
satisfaction. I find there are some of a better and softer 
nature than the persons with whom I have supposed myself 
in debate, who neither think ill of the act of relief, nor by 
any means desire the repeal,—yet who, not accusing, but 
lamenting, what was done, on account of the consequences, 
have frequently expressed their wish that the late act had 
never been made. Some of this description, and persons of 


184 BURKE 


_ worth, I have met with in this city. They conceive that the 
prejudices, whatever they might be, of a large part of the 
people, ought not to have been shocked,—that their opin- 
ions ought to have been previously taken, and much 
attended to,—and that thereby the late horrid scenes 
might have been prevented. 

I confess, my notions are widely different ; and I never 
was less sorry for any action of my life. I like the bill the 
better on account of the events of all kinds that followed it. 
It relieved the real sufferers; it strengthened the state; and, 
by the disorders that ensued, we had clear evidence that 
there lurked a temper somewhere which ought not to be 
fostered by the laws. No ill consequences whatever could 
be attributed to the act itself. We knew beforehand, or we 
were poorly instructed, that toleration is odious to the in- 
tolerant, freedom to oppressors, property to robbers, and all 
kinds and degrees of prosperity to the envious. We knew 
that all these kinds of men would gladly gratify their evil 
dispositions under the sanction of law and religion, if they 
could: if they could not, yet, to make way to their objects, 
they would do their utmost to subvert all religion and all 
law. This we certainly knew. But, knowing this, is there 
any reason, because thieves break in and steal, and thus 
bring detriment to you, and draw ruin on themselves, that I 
am to be sorry that you are in possession of shops, and of 
warehouses, and of wholesome laws to protect them? Are 
you to build no houses, because desperate men may pull 
them down upon their own heads? Or, if a malignant 
wretch will cut his own throat, because he sees you give 
alms to the necessitous and deserving, shall his destruction 
be attributed to your charity, and not to his own deplorable 
madness? If we repent of our good actions, what, I pray 
you, is left for our faults and follies? It is not the benefi- 
cence of the laws, it is the unnatural temper which benefi- 
cence can fret and sour, that is to be lamented. It is this 
temper which, by all rational means, ought to be sweetened 
and corrected. If froward men should refuse this cure, can 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 185 


they vitiate anything but themselves? Does evil so react 
upon good, as not only to retard its motion, but to change 
its nature? If it can so operate, then good men will always 
be in the power of the bad,—and virtue, by a dreadful re- 
verse of order, must lie under perpetual subjection and 
bondage to vice. 

As tothe opinion of the people, which some think, in such 
cases, is to be implicitly obeyed,—near two years’ tranquillity, 
which followed the act, and its instant imitation in Ireland, 
proved abundantly that the late horrible spirit was in a great 
measure the effect of insidious art, and perverse industry, 
and gross misrepresentation. But suppose that the dislike 
had been much more deliberate and much more general than 
I am persuaded it was,—when we know that the opinions of 
even the greatest multitudes are the standard of rectitude, I 
shall think myself obliged to make those opinions the masters 
of my conscience. But if it may be doubted whether Om- 
nipotence itself is competent to alter the essential constitu- 
tion of right and wrong, sure I am that such things as they 
and I are possessed of no such power. Noman carries further 
than I do the policy of making government pleasing to the 
people. But the widest range of this politic complaisance is 
confined within the limits of justice. I would not only con- 
sult the interest of the people, but I would cheerfully 
gratify their humours. We are all a sort of children that 
must be soothed and managed. I think I'am not austere or 
formal in my nature. I would bear, I would even myself 
play my part in, any innocent buffooneries, to divert them. 
But I never will act the tyrant for their amusement. If 
they will mix malice in their sports, I shall never consent to 
throw them any living, sentient creature whatsoever, no, not 
so much as a kitling, to torment. 

“ But if I profess all this impolitic stubbornness, I may 
chance never to be elected into Parliament.’’—It is certainly 
not pleasing to be put out of the public service. But I wish 
to be a member of Parliament to have my share of doing 
good and resisting evil. It would therefore be absurd to re 


186 BURKE 


nounce my objects in order to obtain my seat. I deceive 
myself, indeed, most grossly, if I had not much rather pass 
the remainder of my life hidden in the recesses of the deep- 
est obscurity, feeding my mind even with the visions and 
imaginations of such things, than to be placed on the most 
splendid throne of the universe, tantalized with a denial of 
the practice of all which can make the greatest situation any 
other than the greatest curse. Gentlemen, I have had my 
day. I can never sufficiently express my gratitude to you 
for having set me in a place wherein I could lend the slight- 
est help to great and laudable designs. If I have had my 
share in any measure giving quiet to private property and 
private conscience,—if by my vote I have aided in secur- 
ing to families the best possession, peace,—if I have joined 
in reconciling kings to their subjects, and subjects to their 
prince,—if I have assisted to loosen the foreign holdings of 
the citizen, and taught him to look for his protection to the 
laws of his country, and for his comfort to the good-will of 
his countrymen,—if I have thus taken my part with the best 
of men in the best of their actions, I can shut the book: I 
might wish to read a page or two more, but this is enough 
for my measure. I have not lived in vain. 

And now, Gentlemen, on this serious day, when I come, 
as it were, to make up my accounts with you, let me take to 
myself some degree of honest pride on the nature of the 
charges that are against me. I do not here stand before you 
accused of venality, or of neglect of duty. It is not said, 
that, in the long period of my service, I have, in a single in- 
stance, sacrificed the slightest of your interests to my ambi- 
tion or to my fortune. It is not alleged, that, to gratify any 
anger or revenge of my own, or of my party, I have had 
a share in wronging or oppressing any description of men, 
or any one man in any description. No! the charges 
against me are all of one kind: that I have pushed the prin- 
ciples of general justice and benevolence too far,—further 
than a cautious policy would warrant, and further than the 
Opinions of many would go along with me. In every acci- 


PARLIAMENTARY CONDUCT 187 


dent which may happen through life, in pain, in sorrow, in 
depression, and distress, I will call to mind this accusation, 
and be comforted. | 

Gentlemen, I submit the whole to your judgment. Mr. 
Mayor, I thank you for the trouble you have taken on this 
occasion: in your state of health it is particularly obliging. 
If this company should think it advisable for me to with- 
draw, I shall respectfully retire; if you think otherwise, I 
shall go directly to the Council-House and to the ’Change, 
and without a moment's delay begin my canvass. 


NOTES, 


1. Irish Perpetual Mutiny Act. 
2. Mr. Williams. 
3. The Chancellor. 


a 


ua eae ie , 


ON DECLINING THE POLL 


(Delivered in Bristol, Saturday, September 9, 1780.) 


THIS morning the sheriff and candidates assembled as usual at the 
Council-House, and from thence proceeded to Guildhall. Proclamation 
being made for the electors to appear and give their votes, Mr. Burke 
stood forward on the hustings, surrounded by a great number of the cor- 
poration and other principal citizens, and addressed himself to the whole 
assembly as follows : 


ENTLEMEN,—I decline the election. It has ever 
been my rule through life to observe a proportion 
between my efforts and my objects. I have never been re- 
markable for a bold, active, and sanguine pursuit of advan- 
tages that are personal to myself. 

I have not canvassed the whole of this city in form, but I 
have taken such a view of it as satishles my own mind that 
your choice will not ultimately fall upon me. Your city, 
Gentlemen, is in a state of miserable distraction, and I am 
resolved to withdraw whatever share my pretensions may 


have had in its unhappy divisions. I have not been in haste; 


I have tried all prudent means. I have waited for the effect 
of all contingencies. If I were fond of a contest, by the 
partiality of my numerous friends (whom you know to be 
among the most weighty and respectable people of the city) 
I have the means of a sharp one inmy hands. But I thought 
it far better, with my strength unspent and my reputation 
unimpaired, to do, early and from foresight, that which I 
might be obliged to do from necessity at last. 

I am not in the least surprised nor in the least angry at 


this view of things. I have read the book of life for a long 
189 


190 BURKE 


time, and I have read other books a little. Nothing has 
happened to me, but what has happened to men much better 
than me, and in times and in nations full as good as the age 
and country that we live in. To say that I am no way con- 
cerned would be neither decent nor true. The representa- 
tion of Bristol was an object on many accounts dear to me; 
and I certainly should very far prefer it to any other in the 
kingdom. My habits are made to it; and it is in general 
more unpleasant to be rejected after iene trial than not to 
be chosen at all. 

But, Gentlemen, I will see noenite except your former 
kindness, and I will give way to no other sentiments than 
those of gratitude. From the bottom of my heart I thank 
you for what you have done for me. You have given mea 
long term, which is now expired. I have performed the 
conditions, and enjoyed all the profits to the full; and I now 
surrender your estate into your hands, without being in a 
single tile or a single stone impaired or wasted by my use. 
I have served the public for fifteen years. I have served you 
in particular for six. What is past is well stored ; it is safe, 
and out of the power of fortune. What is to come is in wiser 
hands than ours; and He in whose hands it is best knows 
whether it is best for you and me that I should be in Parlia- 
ment, or even in the world. : 

Gentlemen, the melancholy event of yesterday reads to us 
an awful lesson against being too much troubled about any 
of the objects of ordinary ambition. The worthy gentle- 
man! who has been snatched from us at the moment of the: 
election, and in the middle of the contest, whilst his desires: 
were as warm and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly 
told us what shadows we are and what shadows we pursue. 

It has been usual for a candidate who declines to take his 
leave by a letter to the sheriffs: but I received your trust in 
the face of day, and in the face of day I accept your dismis- 
sion. I am not—TI am not at all ashamed to look upon you; 
nor can my presence discompose the order of business here. 
I humbly and respectfully take my leave of the sheriffs, the 


ON DECLINING THE POLL IOI 


candidates, and the electors, wishing heartily that the choice 
may be for the best, at a time which calls, if ever time did 
call, for service that is not nominal. It is no plaything you 
are about. I tremble, when I consider the trust I have pre- 
sumed to ask. I confided, perhaps, too much in my inten- 
tions. They were really fair and upright; and I am bold to 
say that I ask no ill thing for you, when, on parting from 
this place, I pray, that, whomever you choose to succeed me, 
he may resemble me exactly in all things, except in my abili- 
ties to serve, and my fortune to please you.’ 


NOTE 


1. Mr. Coombe. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 


THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE 


I HAVE endeavoured to make this edition something more full and satisfac- 

tory than the first. I have sought with the utmost care, and read with 
equal attention, everything which has appeared in public against my opinions ; 
I have taken advantage of the candid liberty of my friends; and if by these 
means I have been better enabled to discover the imperfections of the work, 
the indulgence it has received, imperfect as it was, furnished me with a new 
motive to spare no reasonable pains for its improvement. Though I have not 
found sufficient reason, or what appeared to me sufficient, for making any 
material change in my theory, I have found it necessary in many places to 
explain, illustrate, and enforce it. I have prefixed an introductory discourse 
concerning Taste; it is a matter curious in itself; and it leads naturally 
enough to the principal inquiry. This, with the other explanations, has made 
the work considerably larger; and by increasing its bulk has, I am afraid, 
added to its faults; so that notwithstanding all my attention, it may stand 
in need of a yet greater share of indulgence than it required at its first 
appearance. 

They who are accustomed to studies of this nature will expect, and they will 
allow too for many faults. They know that many of the objects of our in- 
quiry are in themselves obscure and intricate; and that many others have 
been rendered so by affected refinements, or false learning; they know that 
there are many impediments in the subject, in the prejudices of others, and 
even in our own, that render it a matter of no small difficulty to showina 
clear light the genuine face of nature. They know that whilst the mind is in- 
tent on the general scheme of things, some particular parts must be neglected ; 
that we must often submit the style to the matter, and frequently give up the 
praise of elegance, satisfied with being clear. 

The characters of nature are legible, it is true; but they are not plain enough 
to enable those who run, to read them. We must make use of a cautious, I 
had almost said, a timorous method of proceeding. We must not attempt to 
fly, when we can scarcely pretend to creep. In considering any complex 
matter, we ought to examine every distinct ingredient in the composition, one 
by one; and reduce everything to the utmost simplicity ; since the condition of 
our nature binds us to a strict law and very narrow limits. We ought after- 


195 


196 BURKE 


wards to re-examine the principles by the effect of the composition, as well as 
the composition by that of the principles. We ought to compare our subject 
with things of a similar nature, and even with things of a contrary nature; for 
discoveries may be, and often are made by the contrast, which would escape 
us on the single view. The greater number of the comparisons we make, the 
more general and the more certain our knowledge is likely to prove, as built 
upon a more extensive and perfect induction. 

If an inquiry thus carefully conducted should fail at last of discovering the 
truth, it may answer an end perhaps as useful, in discovering to us the weak- 
ness of our own understanding. If it does not make us knowing, it may make 
us modest. If it does not preserve us from error, it may at least from the 
spirit of error; and may make us cautious of pronouncing with positiveness or 
with haste, when so much labour may end in so much uncertainty. 

I could wish that, in examining this theory, the same method were pursued 
which I endeavoured to observe in forming it. The objections, in my opinion, 
ought to be proposed, either to the several principles as they are distinctly 
considered, or to the justness of the conclusion which is drawn from them. 
But it is common to pass over both the premises and conclusion in silence, and 
to produce, as an objection, some poetical passage which does not seem easily 
accounted for upon the principles I endeavour to establish. This manner of 
proceeding I should think very improper. The task would be infinite, if we 
could establish no principle until we had previously unraveled the complex 
texture of every image or description to be found in poets and orators. And 
though we should never be able to reconcile the effect of such images to our 
principles, this can never overturn the theory itself, whilst it is founded on 
certain and indisputable facts. A theory founded on experiment, and not 
assumed, is always good for so much as it explains. Our inability to push it 
indefinitely is no argument at all against it. This inability may be owing to our 
ignorance of some necessary mediums; to a want of proper application; to 
many other causes besides a defect in the principles we employ. In reality, 
the subject requires a much closer attention than we dare claim from our 
manner of treating it. 

If it should not appear on the face of the work, I must caution the reader 
against imagining that I intended a full dissertation on the Sublime and Beau- 
tiful. My inquiry went no farther than to the origin of these ideas. If the 
qualities which I have ranged under the head of the Sublime be all found con- 
sistent with each other, and all different from those which I place under the 
head of Beauty; and if those which compose the class of the Beautiful have 
the same consistency with themselves, and the same opposition to those 
which are classed under the denomination of Sublime, I am in little pain 
whether anybody chooses to follow the name I give them or not, provided he 
allows that what I dispose under different heads are in reality different things 
in nature. The use I make of the words may be blamed, as too confined or 
too extended; my meaning can not well be misunderstood. 

To conclude: whatever progress may be made towards the discovery of 
truth in this matter, I do not repent the pains I have taken in it. The use of 
such inquiries may be very considerable. Whatever turns the soul inward on 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 197 


itself, tends to concentre its forces, and to fit it for greater and stronger flights 
of science. By looking into physical causes our minds are opened and en- 
larged; and in this pursuit, whether we take or whether we lose our game, 
the chase is certainly of service. Cicero, true as he was to the academic phi- 
losophy and consequently led to reject the certainty of physical, as of every 
other kind of knowledge, yet freely confesses its great importance to the human 
understanding: “ Est animorum ingeniorumque nostrorum naturale quoddam 
quasi pabulum consideratio contemplatioque nature.” If we can direct the 
lights we derive from such exalted speculations upon the humbler field of the 
imagination, whilst we investigate the springs, and trace the courses of our 
passions, we may not only communicate to the taste a sort of philosophical 
solidity, but we may reflect back on the severer sciences some of the graces and 
elegancies of taste, without which the greatest proficiency in those sciences 
will always have the appearance of something illiberal. 


t 


yee ne eb ile oe at’, 


Whur’ im vet ity ro... 
asia 


pHrsvaise' 


“ON Se ea Cate ee rehis Hhe eD aae e agat : 
, "i , oe eee, ie hah 
; 7 " + w d ae 
i si, dan seated: anon Sa ~~ eee a EP LAR ah Geet at arrd Vow 
¥ ¢ Ke rt i ee De % , : 
u dy 2 fF O54 ick re es + 
eda OF ano A ADE 4 
‘ ” ‘ I Vite 
’ ete ah. Ga tie Ln 
i , . . 
| Lai Y oritubreiinuy abe tae LRTI 2 
4 rh 
2 ¥ q . tie f ra a 
¢ , sab. , eh) | | ; ; 
ROY fly q 
; Wit Oe Downe: es nbn 
y 
] ties Se at ae ' 
far . 
i 
i 
4 
, 
i ae 
“I 
f 


INTRODUCTION 


TASTE 


N a superficial view we may seem to differ very widely 
from each other in our reasonings, and no less in 

our pleasures: but, notwithstanding this difference, which 
I think to be rather apparent than real, it is probable that 
the standard both of reason and taste is the same in all 
human creatures. For if there were not some principles of 
judgment as well as of sentiment common to all mankind, 
no hold could possibly be taken either on their reason or 
their passions, sufficient to maintain the ordinary corre- 
spondence of life. It appears, indeed, to be generally ac- 
knowledged, that with regard to truth and falsehood there 
is something fixed. We find people in their disputes con- 
tinually appealing to certain tests and standards, which are 
allowed on all sides, and are supposed to be established in our 
common nature. But there is not the same obvious concur- 
rence in any uniform or settled principles which relate to 
taste. It is even commonly supposed that this delicate and 
aerial faculty, which seems too volatile to endure even the 
chains of a definition, can not be properly tried by any test, 
nor regulated by any standard. There is so continual a call 
for the exercise of the reasoning faculty ; and it is so much 
strengthened by perpetual contention, that certain maxims 
of right reason seem to be tacitly settled amongst the most 
ignorant. The learned have improved on this rude science, 
and reduced those maxims into a system. If taste has not 
been so happily cultivated, it was not that the subject was 

199 


200 BURKE 


barren, but that the labourers were few or negligent ; for, to 
say the truth, there are not the same interesting motives to 
impel us to fix the one, which urge us to ascertain the other. 
And, after all, if men differ in their opinion concerning such 
matters, their difference is not attended with the same im- 
portant consequences; else I make no doubt but that the 
logic of taste, if I may be allowed the expression, might very 
possibly be as well digested, and we might come to discuss 
matters of this nature with as much certainty, as those which 
seem more immediately within the province of mere reason. 
And, indeed, it is very necessary, at the entrance into such 
an inquiry as our present, to make this point as clear as pos- 
sible; for if taste has no fixed principles, if the imagination 
is not affected according to some invariable and certain laws, 
our labour is likely to be employed to very little purpose; as 
it must be judged an useless, if not an absurd undertaking, 
to lay down rules for caprice, and to set up for a legislator 
of whims and fancies. 

The term taste, like all other figurative terms, is not ex- 
tremely accurate; the thing which we understand by it is far 
from a simple and determinate idea in the minds of most 
men, and it is therefore liable to uncertainty and confusion. 
I have no great opinion of adefinition, the celebrated remedy 
for the cure of this disorder. For, when we define, we 
seem in danger of circumscribing nature within the bounds 
of our own notions, which we often take up by hazard or 
embrace on trust, or form out of a limited and partial con- 
sideration of the object before us; instead of extending our 
ideas to take in all that nature comprehends, according to 
her manner of combining. We are limited in our inquiry 
by the strict laws to which we have submitted at our setting 


out. 


Circa vilem patulumque morabimur orbem, 
Unde pudor proferre pedem vetat aut operis lex. 


A. definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very 
little way towards informing us of the nature of the thing 
defined; but let the virtue of a definition be what it will, in 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 201 


the order of things, it seems rather to follow than to precede 
our inquiry, of which it ought to be considered as the result. 
It must be acknowledged that the methods of disquisition 
and teaching may be sometimes different, and on very good 
reason undoubtedly ; but, for my part, I am convinced that 
the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to 
the method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, 
not content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, 
it leads to the stock on which they grew; it tends to set the 
reader himself in the track of invention, and to direct him 
into those paths in which the author has made his own dis- 
coveries, if he should be so happy as to have made any that 
are valuable. 

But to cut off all pretense for caviling, I mean by the 
word taste, no more than that faculty or those faculties of 
the mind, which are affected with, or which form a judgment 
of, the works of imagination and the elegant arts. This is, 
I think, the most general idea of that word, and what is the 
least connected with any particular theory. And my point 
in this inquiry is, to find whether there are any principles, 
on which the imagination is affected, so common to all, so 
grounded and certain, as to supply the means of reasoning 
satisfactorily about them. And such principles of taste I 
fancy there are; however paradoxical it may’ seem to those, 
who on a superficial view imagine that there is so great a 
diversity of tastes, both in kind and degree, that nothing 
can be more indeterminate. 

All the natural powers in man, which I know, that are 
conversant about external objects, are the senses; the imagi- 
nation; and the judgment. And first with regard to the 
senses. We do and we must suppose, that as the conforma- 
tion of their organs are nearly or altogether the same in all 
men, so the manner of perceiving external objects is in all 
men the same, or with little difference. We are satisfied 
that what appears to be light to one eye, appears light to 
another; that what seems sweet to one palate, is sweet to 
another; that what is dark and bitter to this man, is likewise 


202 BURKE 


dark and bitter to that ; and we conclude in the same man- 
ner of great and little, hard and soft, hot and cold, rough and 
smooth ; and indeed of all the natural qualities and affec- 
tions of bodies. If we suffer ourselves to imagine, that their 
senses present to different men different images of things, 
this sceptical proceeding will make every sort of reasoning 
on every subject vain and frivolous, even that sceptical 
reasoning itself which had persuaded us to entertain a doubt 
concerning the agreement of our perceptions. But as there 
will be little doubt that bodies present similar images to the 
whole species, it must necessarily be allowed, that the pleas- 

ures and the pains which every object excites in one man, — 
it must raise in all mankind, whilst it operates naturally, 
simply, and by its proper powers only: for if we deny this, 
we must imagine that the same cause, operating in the same 
manner, and on subjects of the same kind, will produce 
different effects; which would be highly absurd. Let us 
first consider this point in the sense of taste, and the rather 
as the faculty in question has taken its name from that sense. 
All men are agreed to call vinegar sour, honey sweet, and 
aloes bitter; and as they are all agreed in finding these quali- 
ties in those objects, they do not in the least differ concern- 
ing their effects with regard to pleasure and pain. They all 
concur in calling sweetness pleasant, and sourness and bitter- 
ness unpleasant. Here there is no diversity in their senti- _ 
ments; and that there is not, appears fully from the consent 
of all men in the metaphors which are taken from the sense — 
of taste. A sour temper, bitter expressions, bitter curses, a 
bitter fate, are terms well and strongly understood by all. 
And we are altogether as well understood when we say, a 
sweet disposition, a sweet person, a sweet condition and the 
like. It is confessed, that custom and some other causes 
have made many deviations from the natural pleasures or 
pains which belong to these several tastes; but then the 
power of distinguishing between the natural and the acquired 
relish remains to the very last. A man frequently comes to 
prefer the taste of tobacco to that of sugar, and the flavour of 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 203 


vinegar to that of milk; but this makes no confusion in 
tastes, whilst he is sensible that the tobacco and vinegar are 
not sweet, and whilst he knows that habit alone has recon- 
ciled his palate to these alien pleasures. Even with sucha 
person we may speak, and with sufficient precision, concern- 
ing tastes. But should any man be found who declares, 
that to him tobacco has a taste like sugar, and that he can 
not distinguish between milk and vinegar ; or that tobacco 
and vinegar are sweet, milk bitter, and sugar sour; we im- 
mediately conclude that the organs of this man are out of 
order, and that his palate is utterly vitiated. We are as far 
from conferring with such a person upon tastes, as from 
reasoning concerning the relations of quantity with one who 
should deny that all the parts together were equal to the 
whole. We do not call a man of this kind wrong in his 
notions, but absolutely mad. Exceptions of this sort, in 
either way, do not at all impeach our general rule, nor make 
us conclude that men have various principles concerning the 
relations of quantity or the taste of things. So that when 
it is said, taste can not be disputed, it can’ only mean, that 
no one can strictly answer what pleasure or pain some par- 
ticular man may find from the taste of some particular thing. 
This indeed can not be disputed; but we may dispute, and 
with sufficient clearness too, concerning the things which are 
naturally pleasing or disagreeable to the sense. But when 
we talk of any particular or acquired relish, then we must 
know the habits, the prejudices, or the distempers of this 
particular man, and we must draw our conclusion from those. 

This agreement of mankind is not confined to the taste 
solely. The principle of pleasure derived from sight is the 
same in all, Light is more pleasing than darkness. Sum- 
mer, when the earth is clad in green, when the heavens are 
serene and bright, is more agreeable than winter, when every- 
thing makes a different appearance. I never remember that 
anything beautiful, whether a man, a beast, a bird, ora plant, 
was ever shown, though it were to a hundred people, that 
they did not all immediately agree that it was beautiful, 


204 BURKE 


though some might have thought that it fell short of their 
expectation, or that other things werestillfiner. I believeno 
man thinks a goose to be more beautiful than a swan, or 
imagines that what they call a Friesland hen excels a pea- 
cock. It must be observed too, that the pleasures of the 
sight are not near so complicated, and confused, and altered 
by unnatural habits and associations, as the pleasures of the 
taste are; because the pleasures of the sight more commonly 
acquiesce in themselves; and are not so often altered by 
considerations which are independent of the sight itself. 
But things do not spontaneously present themselves to the 
palate as they do to the sight; they are generally applied to 
it, either as food or as medicine; and from the qualities 
which they possess for nutritive or medicinal purposes they 
often form the palate by degrees, and by force of these 
associations. Thus opium is pleasing to Turks, on account 
of the agreeable delirium it produces. ‘Tobacco is the delight 
of Dutchmen, as it diffuses a torpor and pleasing stupefac- 
tion. Fermented spirits please our common people, because 
they banish care, and all consideration of future or present 
evils. All of these would lie absolutely neglected if their 
properties had originally gone no further than the taste; 
but all these, together with tea and coffee, and some other 
things, have passed from the apothecary’s shop to our tables, 
and were taken for health long before they were thought of 
for pleasure. The effect of the drug has made us use it 
frequently; and frequent use, combined with the agreeable 
effect, has made the taste itself at last agreeable. But this 
does not in the least perplex our reasoning; because we dis- 
tinguish to the last the acquired from the natural relish. In 
describing the taste of an unknown fruit, you would scarcely 
say that it had a sweet and pleasant flavour like tobacco, 
opium, or garlic, although you spoke to those who were in 
the constant use of these drugs, and had great pleasure in 
them. There is in all men a sufficient remembrance of the 
original natural causes of pleasure, to enable them to bring 
all things offered to their senses to that standard, and to 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 205 


regulate their feelings and opinions by it. Suppose one who 
had so vitiated his palate as to take more pleasure in the 
taste of opium than in that of butter or honey, to be pre- 
sented with a bolus of squills: there is hardly any doubt 
but that he would prefer the butter or honey to this nau- 
seous morsel, orto any other bitter drug to which he had not 
been accustomed ; which proves that his palate was naturally 
like that of other men in all things, that it is still like the 
palate of other men in many things, and only vitiated in 
some particular points. For in judging of any new thing, 
even of a taste similar to that which he has been formed by 
habit to like, he finds his palate affected in the natural man- 
ner, and on the common principles. Thus the pleasure of 
all the senses, of the sight, and even of the taste, that most 
ambiguous of the senses, is the same in all, high and low, 
learned and unlearned. 

Besides the ideas, with their annexed pains and pleasures, 
which are presented by the sense; the mind of man pos- 
sesses a sort of creative power of its own; either in represent- 
ing at pleasure the images of things in the order and manner in 
which they were received by the senses, or in combining 
those images in a new manner, and according to a different 
order. This power is called imagination; and to this be- 
longs whatever is called wit, fancy, invention, and the like. 
But it must be observed, that this power of the imagination 
is incapable of producing anything absolutely new; it can 
only vary the disposition of those ideas which it has re- 
ceived from the senses. Now the imagination is the most 
extensive province of pleasure and pain, as it is the region 
of our fears and our hopes, and of all our passions that are 
connected with them; and whatever is calculated to affect 
the imagination with these commanding ideas, by force of 
any original natural impression, must have the same power 
pretty equally over all men. For since the imagination is 
only the representation of the senses, it can only be pleased 
or displeased with the images, from the same principle on 
which the sense is pleased or displeased with the realities; 


206 BURKE 


and consequently there must be just as close an agreement 
in the imaginations as in the senses of men. A little at- 
tention will convince us that this must of necessity be the 
case. 

But in the imagination, besides the pain or pleasure arising 
from the properties of the natural object, a pleasure is per- 
ceived from the resemblance which the imitation has to 
the original: the imagination, I conceive, can have no pleas- 
ure but what results from one or other of these causes. 
And these causes operate pretty uniformly upon all men, be- 
cause they operate by principles in nature, and which are not 
derived from any particular habits or advantages. Mr. 
Locke very justly and finely observes of wit, that it is chiefly 
conversant in tracing resemblances; he remarks, at the same 
time, that the business of judgment is rather in finding dif- 
ferences. It may perhaps appear, on this supposition, that 
there is no material distinction between the wit and the 
judgment, as they both seem to result from different opera- 
tions of the same faculty of comparing. But in reality, 
whether they are or are not dependent on the same power 
of the mind, they differ so very materially in many respects, 
that a perfect union of wit and judgment is one of the rarest 
things in the world. When two distinct objects are unlike 
to each other, it is only what we expect; things are in their 
common way; and therefore they make no impression on 
the imagination: but when two distinct objects have a re- 
semblance, we are struck, we attend to them, and we are 
pleased. The mind of man has naturally a far greater alac- 
rity and satisfaction in tracing resemblances than in search- 
ing for differences: because by making resemblances we pro- 
duce new images; we unite, we create, we enlarge our stock; 
but in making distinctions we offer no food at all to the im- 
agination; the task itself is more severe and irksome, and 
what pleasure we derive from it is something of a negative 
and indirect nature. A piece of news is told me in the 
morning; this, merely as a piece of news, as a fact added to 
my stock, gives me some pleasure. In the evening I find 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 207 


there was nothing in it. What do I gain by this, but the 
dissatisfaction to find that I had been imposed upon? 
Hence it is that men are much more naturally inclined to 
belief than to incredulity. And it is upon this principle, 
that the most ignorant and barbarous nations have frequently 
excelled in similitudes, comparisons, metaphors, and alle- 
gories, who have been weak and backward in distinguishing 
and sorting their ideas. And it is for a reason of this kind, 
that Homer and the oriental writers, though very fond of 
similitudes, and though they often strike out such as are 
truly admirable, seldom take care to have them exact; that 
is, they are taken with the general resemblance, they paint 
it strongly, and they take no notice of the difference which 
may be found between the things compared. 

Now as the pleasure of resemblance is that which princi- 
pally flatters the imagination, all men are nearly equal in 
this point, as far as their knowledge of the things represented 
or compared extends. The principle of this knowledge is 
very much accidental, as it depends upon experience and 
observation, and not on the strength or weakness of any 
natural faculty ; and it is from this difference in knowledge, 
that what we commonly, though with no great exactness, 
call a difference in taste proceeds. A man to whom sculp- 
ture is new, sees a barber’s block, or some ordinary piece of 
statuary ; he is immediately struck and pleased, because he 
sees something like a human figure; and, entirely taken up 
with this likeness, he does not at all attend to its defects. 
No person, I believe, at the first time of seeing a piece of 
imitation ever did. Some time after, we suppose that this 
novice lights upon a more artificial work of the same nature; 
he now begins to look with contempt on what he admired 
at first; not that he admired it even then for its unlikeness 
to a man, but for that general though inaccurate resemblance 
which it bore to the human figure. What he admired at 
different times in these so different figures, is strictly the 
same; and though his knowledge is improved, his taste 
is not altered. Hitherto his mistake was from a want of 


208 BURKE 


knowledge in art, and this arose from his inexperience; but 
he may be still deficient from a want of knowledge in nature. 
For it is possible that the man in question may stop here, 
and that the masterpiece of a great hand may please him 
no more than the middling performance of a vulgar artist; 
and this not for want of better or higher relish, but because 
all men do not observe with sufficient accuracy on the human 
figure to enable them to judge properly of an imitation of 
it. And that the critical taste does not depend upon a 
superior principle in men, but upon superior knowledge, 
may appear from several instances. The story of the an- 
cient painter and the shoemaker is very well known. The 
shoemaker set the painter right with regard to some mis- 
takes he had made in the shoe of one of his figures, which 
the painter, who had not made such accurate observations 
on shoes, and was content with a general resemblance, had 
never observed. But this was no impeachment to the taste 
of the painter; it only showed some want of knowledge in 
the art of making shoes. Let us imagine, that an anatomist 
had come into the painter’s working-room. His piece is in 
general well done, the figure in question in a good attitude,. 
and the parts well adjusted to their various movements; yet 
the anatomist, critical in his art, may observe the swell of 
some muscle not quite just in the peculiar action of the 
figure. Here the anatomist observes what the painter had 
not observed; and he passes by what the shoemaker had 
remarked. But a want of the last critical knowledge in 
anatomy no more reflected on the natural good taste of the 
painter, or of any common observer of his piece, than the 
want of an exact knowledge in the formation of ashoe. A 
fine piece of a decollated head of St. John the Baptist was 
shown toa Turkish emperor: he praised many things, but he 
observed one defect: he observed that the skin did not 
shrink from the wounded part of the neck. The sultan on 
this occasion, though his observation was very just, discov- 
ered no more natural taste than the painter who executed 
this piece, or than a thousand European connoisseurs, who 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 209 


probably never would have made the same observation. His 
Turkish majesty had indeed been well acquainted with that 
terrible spectacle, which the others could only have repre- 
sented in their imagination. On the subject of their dislike 
there is a difference between all these people, arising from 
the different kinds and degrees of their knowledge; but 
there is something in common to the painter, the shoe- 
maker, the anatomist, and the Turkish emperor, the pleasure 
arising from a natural object, so far as each perceives it 
justly imitated; the satisfaction in seeing an agreeable 
figure; the sympathy proceeding from a striking and affect- 
ing incident. So far as taste is natural, it is nearly common 
to all. 

In poetry, and other pieces of imagination, the same parity 
may be observed. It is true, that one man is charmed with 
Don Bellianis, and reads Virgil coldly; whilst another is 
transported with the “ AZneid,’ and leaves Don Bellianis to 
children. These two men seem to have a taste very differ- 
ent from each other; but in fact they differ very little. In 
both these pieces, which inspire such opposite sentiments, a 
tale exciting admiration is told; both are full of action, both 
are passionate; in both are voyages, battles, triumphs, and 
continual changes of fortune. The admirer of Don Bellianis 
perhaps does not understand the refined language of the 
« ZEneid,” who, if it was degraded into the style of the 
_ “Pilgrim’s Progress,” might feel it in all its energy, on the 
same principle which made him an admirer of Don Bellianis. 

In his favourite author he is not shocked with the continual 
breaches of probability, the confusion of times, the offenses 
against manners, the trampling upon geography; for he 
knows nothing of geography and chronology, and he has 
never examined the grounds of probability. He perhaps 
reads of a shipwreck on the coast of Bohemia: wholly taken 
up with so interesting an event, and only solicitous for the 
fate of his hero, he is not in the least troubled at this ex- 
travagant blunder. For why should he be shocked at a ship- 


wreck on the coast of Bohemia, who does not know but 
14 


210 BURKE 


that Bohemia may be an island in the Atlantic ocean? and 
after all, what reflection is this on the natural good taste of 
the person here supposed ? 

So far then as taste belongs to the imagination, its princi- 
ple is the same in all men; there is no difference in the man- 
ner of their being affected, nor in the causes of the affection ; 
but in the degree there is a difference, which arises from two 
causes principally; either from a greater degree of natural 
sensibility, or from a closer and longer attention to the ob- 
ject. To illustrate this by the procedure of the senses, in 
which the same difference is found, let us suppose a very — 
smooth marble table to be set before two men; they both 
perceive it to be smooth, and they are both pleased with it 
because of this quality. So far they agree. But suppose 
another, and after that another table, the latter still smoother 
than the former, to be set before them. It is now very 
probable that these men, who are so agreed upon what is 
smooth, and in the pleasure from thence, will disagree when — 
they come to settle which table has the advantage in point 
of polish. Here is indeed the great difference between tastes, 
when men come to compare the excess or diminution of 
things which are judged by degree and not by measure, 
Nor is it easy, when such a difference arises, to settle the 
point, if the excess or diminution be not glaring. If we 
differ in opinion about two quantities, we can have recourse 
to a common measure, which may decide the question with 
the utmost exactness; and this, I take it, is what gives 
mathematical knowledge a greater certainty than any other. 
But in things whose excess is not judged by greater or 
smaller, as smoothness and roughness, hardness and softness, 
darkness and light, the shades of colours, all these are very 
easily distinguished when the difference is any way consid- 
erable, but not when it is minute, for want of some common 
measures, which perhaps may never come to be discovered. 
In these nice cases, supposing the acuteness of the sense 
equal, the greater attention and habit in such things will 
have the advantage. In the question about the tables, the 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 211 


marble-polisher will unquestionably determine the most 
accurately. But notwithstanding this want of a common 
measure for settling many disputes relative to the senses, 
and their representative the imagination, we find that the 
principles are the same in all, and that there is no disagree- 
ment until we come to examine into the pre-eminence or 
difference of things, which brings us within the province of 
the judgment. 

So long as we are conversant with the sensible qualities of 
things, hardly any more than the imagination seems con- 
cerned; little more also than the imagination seems con- 
cerned when the passions are represented, because by the 
force of natural sympathy they are felt in all men without 
any recourse to reasoning, and their justness recognized in 
every breast. Love, grief, fear, anger, Joy, all these passions 
have, in their turns, affected every mind; and they do not 
affect it in an arbitrary or casual manner, but upon certain, 
natural, and uniform principles. But as many of the works 
of imagination are not confined to the representation of 
sensible objects, nor to effects upon the passions, but extend 
themselves to the manners, the characters, the actions, and 
designs of men, their relations, their virtues and vices, they 
come within the province of the judgment, which is im- 
proved by attention, and by the habit of reasoning. All 
these make avery considerable part of what are considered 
as the objects of taste; and Horace sends us to the schools 
of philosophy and the world for our instruction in them. 
Whatever certainty is to be acquired in morality and the 
science of life; just the same degree of certainty have we 
in what relates to them in works of imitation. Indeed it is 
for the most part in our skill in manners, and in the observ- 
ances of time and place, and of decency in general, which is 
only to be learned in those schools to which Horace recom- 
mends us, that what is called taste, by way of distinction, 
consists: and which is in reality no other than a more refined 
judgment. On the whole, it appears to me, that what is 
called taste, in its most general acceptation, is not a simple 


212 BURKE 


idea, but is partly made up of a perception of the primary 
pleasures of sense, of the secondary pleasures of the imagi- 
nation, and of the conclusions of the reasoning faculty, 
concerning the various relations of these, and concerning 
the human passions, manners, and actions. All this is 
requisite to form taste, and the groundwork of all these 
is the same in the human mind; for as the senses are 
the great originals of all our ideas, and consequently of all 
our pleasures, if they are not uncertain and arbitrary, the 
whole groundwork of taste is common to all, and therefore 
there is a sufficient foundation fora conclusive reasoning on 
these matters. 

Whilst we consider taste merely according to its nature 
and species, we shall find its principles entirely uniform ; but 
the degree in which these principles prevail, in the several 
individuals of mankind, is altogether as different as the 
principles themselves are similar. For sensibility and judg- 
ment, which are the qualities that compose what we com- 
monly call a taste, vary exceedingly in various people. 
From a defect in the former of these qualities arises a want 
of taste; a weakness in the latter constitutes a wrong ora 
bad one. There are some men formed with feelings so blunt, 
with tempers so cold and phlegmatic, that they can hardly 
be saidto be awake during the whole course of their lives. 
Upon such persons the most striking objects make but a 
faint and obscure impression. There are others so continu- 
ally in the agitation of gross and merely sensual pleasures, 
or so occupied in the low drudgery of avarice, or so heated 
in the chase of honours and distinction, that their minds, 
which had been used continually to the storms of these 
violent and tempestuous passions, can hardly be put in 
motion by the delicate and refined play of the imagination. 
These men, though from a different cause, become as stupid 
and insensible as the former; but whenever either of these 
happen to be struck with any natural elegance or greatness, 
or with these qualities in any work of art, they are moved 
upon the same principle. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 213 


The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment. And 
this may arise from a natural weakness of understanding (in 
whatever the strength of that faculty may consist), or, which 
is much more commonly the case, it may arise from a want 
of a proper and well-directed exercise, which alone can make 
it strong and ready. Besides, that ignorance, inattention, 
prejudice, rashness, levity, obstinacy, in short, all those pas- 
sions, and all those vices, which pervert the judgment in 
other matters, prejudice it no less in this its more refined 
and elegant province. These causes produce different opin- 
ions upon everything which is an object of the understand- 
ing, without inducing us to suppose that there are no settled 
principles of reason. And indeed, on the whole, one may 
observe, that there is rather less difference upon matters of 
taste among mankind, than upon most of those which de- 
pend upon the naked reason; and that men are far better 
agreed on the excellence of a description in Virgil, than on 
the truth or falsehood of a theory of Aristotle. 

A rectitude of judgment in the arts, which may be called 
a good taste, does in a great measure depend upon sensi- — 
bility ; because if the mind has no bent to the pleasures of 
the imagination, it will never apply itself sufficiently to 
works of that species to acquire a competent knowledge in 
them. But though a degree of sensibility is requisite to 
form a good judgment, yet a good judgment does not 
necessarily arise from a quick sensibility of pleasure ; it fre- 
quently happens that a very poor judge, merely by force of 
a greater complexional sensibility, is more affected by avery 
poor piece, than the best judge by the most perfect; for as 
everything new, extraordinary, grand, or passionate, is well 
calculated to affect such a person, and that the faults do not 
affect him, his pleasure is more pure and unmixed; and as it 
is merely a pleasure of the imagination, it is much higher 
than any which is derived from a rectitude of the judgment ; 
the judgment is for the greater part employed in throwing 
stumbling-blocks in the way of the imagination, in dissipat- 
ing the scenes of its enchantment, and in tying us down to 


214 BURKE 


the disagreeable yoke of our reason: for almost the only 
pleasure that men have in judging better than others, con- 
sists in a sort of conscious pride and superiority, which arises 
from thinking rightly; but then this is an indirect pleasure, 
a pleasure which does not immediately result from the object 
which is under contemplation. In the morning of our days, 
when the senses are unworn and tender, when the whole 
man is awake in every part, and the gloss of novelty fresh 
upon all the objects that surround us, how lively at that 
time are our sensations, but how false and inaccurate the 
judgments we form of things! I despair of ever receiving 
the same degree of pleasure from the most excellent perform- 
ances of genius, which I felt at that age from pieces which 
my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible. 
Every trivial cause of pleasure is apt to affect the man of 
too sanguinea complexion: his appetite is too keen to suffer 
his taste to be delicate; and he is in all respects what Ovid 
says of himself in love, 


Molle meum levibus cor est violabile telis, 
Et semper causa est, cur ego semper amem. 


One of this character can never bea refined judge; never 
what the comic poet calls “elegans formarum spectator.” 
’ The: excellence and force of a composition must always be 
imperfectly estimated from its effect on the minds of any, 
except we know the temper and character of those minds. 
The most powerful effects of poetry and music have been 
displayed, and perhaps are still displayed, where these arts 
are but in a very low and imperfect state. The rude hearer 
is affected by the principles which operate in these arts even 
in their rudest condition; and he is not skilful-enough to 
perceive the defects. But as the arts advance towards their 
perfection, the science of criticism advances with equal pace, 
and the pleasure of judges is frequently interrupted by the 
faults which are discovered in the most finished com- 
positions. 

Before I leave this subject, I cannot help taking notice of 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 215 


an opinion which many persons entertain, as if the taste 
were a separate faculty of the mind, and distinct from the 
judgment and imagination ; a species of instinct, by which 
we are struck naturally, and at the first glance, without any 
previous reasoning, with the excellences or defects of a 
composition. So faras the imagination and the passions are 
concerned, I believe it true that the reason is little con- » 
sulted ; but where disposition, where decorum, where con- - 
gruity are concerned, in short, wherever the best taste dif.- 
fers from the worst, I am convinced that the understanding 
operates, and nothing else; and its operation is in reality 
far from being always sudden, or, when it is sudden, it is 
often far from being right. Men of the best taste by con- 
sideration come frequently to change these early and pre- 
cipitate judgments, which the mind, from its aversion to neu- 
trality and doubt, loves to form on the spot. It is known 
that the taste (whatever it is) is improved exactly as we im- 
prove our judgment, by extending our knowledge, by a 
steady attention to our object, and by frequent exercise. 
They who have not taken these methods, if their taste de- 
cides quickly, it is always uncertainly; and their quickness 
is owing to their presumption and rashness, and not to any 
sudden irradiation, that in a moment dispels all darkness 
from their minds. But they who have cultivated that spe- 
cies of knowledge which makes the object of taste, by de- 
grees and habitually attain not only a soundness but a readi- 
ness of judgment, as men do by the same methods on all 
other occasions. At first they are obliged to spell, but at 
last they read with ease and with celerity; but this celerity 
of its operation is no proof that the taste is a distinct fac- 
ulty. Nobody, I believe, has attended the course of a dis- 
cussion which turned upon matters within the sphere of 
mere naked reason, but must have observed the extreme 
readiness with which the whole process of the argument is 
carried on, the grounds discovered, the objections raised and 
answered, and the conclusions drawn from premises, with a 
quickness altogether as great as the taste can be supposed 


216 BURKE 


to work with; and yet where nothing but plain reason either 
is or can be suspected to operate. To multiply principles 
for every different appearance is useless, and unphilosophical 
too in a high degree. 

This matter might be pursued much farther; but it is not 
the extent of the subject which must prescribe our bounds, 
for what subject does not branch out to infinity? It is the 
nature of our particular scheme, and the single point of view 
in which we consider it, which ought to put a stop to our 
researches, 


PARSER SL 


SECTION I 


NOVELTY 


HE first and the simplest emotion which we discover 

in the human mind is curiosity. By curiosity 1 mean 
whatever desire we have for, or whatever pleasure we take 
in, novelty. We see children perpetually running from 
place to place, to hunt out something new: they catch with 
great eagerness, and with very little choice, at whatever 
comes before them; their attention is engaged by every- 
thing, because everything has, in that stage of life, the charm 
of novelty to recommend it. But as those things, which 
engage us merely by their novelty, can not attach us for any 
length of time, curiosity is the most superficial of all the 
affections ; it changes its object perpetually ; it has an 
appetite which is very sharp, but very easily satisfied; and 
it has always an appearance of giddiness, restlessness, and 
anxiety. Curiosity, from its nature, isa very active princi- 
ple; it quickly runs over the greatest part of its objects, 
and soon exhausts the variety which is commonly to be met 
with in nature; the same things make frequent returns, and 
they return with less and less of any agreeable effect. In 
short, the occurrences of life, by the time we come to know 
it a little, would be incapable of affecting the mind with any 
other sensations than those of loathing and weariness, if 
many things were not adapted to affect the mind by means 
of other powers besides novelty in them, and of other pas- 
sions besides curiosity in ourselves. These powers and pas- 
sions shall be considered in their place. But, whatever these 

217 


218 BURKE 


powers are, or upon what principle soever they affect the 
mind, it is absolutely necessary that they should not be 
exerted in those things which a daily and vulgar use have 
brought into a stale unaffecting familiarity. Some degree 
of novelty must be one of the materials in every instrument 
which works upon the mind; and curiosity blends itself 
more or less with all our passions. | 


SEGTLONIIT 


PAIN AND PLEASURE 


IT seems, then, necessary towards moving the passions of 
people advanced in life to any considerable degree, that the 
objects designed for that purpose, besides their being in 
some measure new, should be capable of exciting pain or 
pleasure from other causes. Pain and pleasure are simple 
ideas, incapable of definition. People are not liable to be 
mistaken in their feelings, but they are very frequently 
wrong in the names they give them, and in their reasonings 
about them. Many are of opinion, that pain arises neces- 
sarily from the removal of some pleasure; as they think 
pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution of some pain. 
For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that pain and 
pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affect- 
ing, are each of a positive nature, and by no means neces- 
sarily dependent on each other for their existence. The 
human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in 
a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of 
indifference. WhenI am carried from this state into a state 
of actual pleasure, it does not appear necessary that I should 
pass through the medium of any sort of pain. If in sucha 
state of indifference, or ease, or tranquillity, or call it what 
you please, you were to be suddenly entertained with a con- 
cert of music; or suppose some object of a fine shape, and 
bright, lively colours, to be presented before you; or imagine 
your smell is gratified with the fragrance of arose; or if, with- 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 219 


out any previous thirst, you were to drink of some pleasant 
kind of wine, or to taste of some sweetmeat without being 
hungry; in all the several senses, of hearing, smelling, and 
tasting, you undoubtedly find a pleasure; yet, if I inquire 
into the state of your mind previous to these gratifications, 
you will hardly tell me that they found you in any kind of 
pain; or, having satisfied these several senses with their 
several pleasures, will you say that any pain has succeeded, 
though the pleasure is absolutely over? Suppose, on the 
other hand, a man in the same state of indifference to receive 
a violent blow, or to drink of some bitter potion, or to have 
his ears wounded with some harsh and grating sound; here 
isno removal of pleasure; and yet here is felt, in every sense 
which is affected, a pain very distinguishable. It may be 
said, perhaps, that the pain in these cases had its rise from 
the removal of the pleasure which the man enjoyed before, 
though that pleasure was of so low a degree as to be per- 
ceived only by the removal. But this seems to me a sub- 
tilty that is not discoverable in nature. For if, previous to 
the pain, I do not feel any actual pleasure, I have no reason 
to judge that any such thing exists; since pleasure is only 
pleasure as it is felt. The same may be said of pain, and 
with equal reason. I can never persuade myself that pleas- 
ure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist as they 
are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly that there 
are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at all depend 
upon each other. Nothing is more certain to my own feel- 
ings than this. There is nothing which I can distinguish in 
my mind with more clearness than the three states, of indif- 
ference, of pleasure, and of pain. Every one of these I can 
perceive without any sort of idea of its relation to anything 
else. Caius is afflicted with a fit of the colic; this man is 
actually in pain; stretch Caius upon the rack, he will feela 
much greater pain: but does this pain of the rack arise from 
the removal of any pleasure? or is the fit of the colic a 
pleasure or a pain just as we are pleased to consider it? 


220 BURKE 


SECTION III 


_ THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE REMOVAL OF PAIN AND 
POSITIVE PLEASURE 


WE shall carry this proposition yet a step further. We 
shall venture to propose, that pain and pleasure are not only 
not necessarily dependent for their existence on their mutual 
diminution or removal, but that, in reality, the diminution 
or ceasing of pleasure does not operate like positive pain ; 
and that the removal or diminution of pain, in its effect, has 
very little resemblance to positive pleasure. The former 
of these propositions will, I believe, be much more readily 
allowed than-the latter; because it is very evident that pleas- 
ure, when it has run its career, sets us down very nearly 
where it found us. Pleasure of every kind quickly satisfies; 
and, when it is over, we relapse into indifference, or, rather, 
we fall into a soft tranquillity which is tinged with the agree- 
able colour of the former sensation. I own it is not at first 
view so apparent that the removal of a great pain does not 
resemble positive pleasure: but let us recollect in what state 
we have found our minds upon escaping some imminent 
danger, or on being released from the severity of some cruel 
pain. We have on such occasions found, if I am not much 
mistaken, the temper of our minds in a tenor very remote 
from that which attends the presence of positive pleasure; 
we have found them in a state of much sobriety, impressed 
with a sense of awe, in a sort of tranquillity shadowed with 
horror. The fashion of the countenance and the gesture of 
the body on such occasions is so correspondent to this state 
of mind, that any person, a stranger to the cause of the ap- 
pearance, would rather judge us under some consternation, 
than in the enjoyment of anything like positive pleasure. 


‘Q¢ 0 brav avdp’ ary mwuKivy AGB, bor’ evi waTpy 
bora kataxteivac, dAAwy ékixeto Sjpov, 
"Avdpoc é¢ agverod, OauBoc 0 Eee eioopdwrrac. 

Tliad. Q. 480. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 221 


* As when a wretch, who, conscious of his crime, 
Pursued for murder from his native clime, 
Just gains some frontier, breathless, pale, amazed 
All gaze, all wonder!” 


This striking appearance of the man whom Homer supposes 
to have just escaped an imminent danger, the sort of mixed 
passion of terror and surprise, with which he affects the 
spectators, paints very strongly the manner in which we find 
ourselves affected upon occasions any way similar. For 
when we have suffered from any violent emotion, the mind 
naturally continues in something like the same condition, 
after the cause which first produced it has ceased to operate. 
The tossing of the sea remains after the storm ; and when this 
remain of horror has entirely subsided, all the passion which 
the accident raised subsides along with it; and the mind 
returns to its usual state of indifference. In short, pleasure 
(I mean anything either in the inward sensation, or in the 
outward appearance, like pleasure from a positive cause) 
has never, I imagine, its origin from the removal of pain or 
danger. 
NOTE 

1 Mr. Locke [Essay on Human Understanding, 1. ii. c. 20, sect. 16,] thinks 

that the removal or lessening of a pain is considered and operates as a pleasure, 


and the loss or diminishing of pleasure as a pain. It is this opinion which we 
consider here. 


SECTION IV 
OF DELIGHT AND PLEASURE AS OPPOSED TO EACH OTHER 


BUT shall we therefore say, that the removal of pain or its 
diminution is always simply painful? or affirm that the 
cessation or the lessening of pleasure is always attended 
itself with a pleasure? By no means. What I advance is 
no more than this; first, that there are pleasures and pains 
of a positive and independent nature; and, secondly, that 
the feeling which results from the ceasing or diminution of 


222 BURKE 


pain does not bear a sufficient resemblance to positive 
pleasure, to have it considered as of the same nature, or to 
entitle itto be known by the same name; and thirdly, that 
upon the same principle the removal or qualification of 
pleasure has no resemblance to positive pain. It is certain 
that the former feeling (the removal or moderation of pain) 
has something in it farfrom distressing, or disagreeable in 
its nature. This feeling, in many cases so agreeable, but in 
all so different from positive pleasure, has no name which I 
know; but that hinders not its being avery real one, and very 
different fromallothers. It is most certain, that every species 
of satisfaction or pleasure, how different soever in its manner 
of affecting, is of a positive nature in the mind of him who 
feels it. The affection is undoubtedly positive; but the 
cause may be, as in this case it certainly is, a sort of priva- 
tion. And it is very reasonable that we should distinguish 
by some term two things so distinct in nature, as a pleasure 
that is such simply, and without any relation, from that 
pleasure which can not exist without a relation, and that, too, 
a relation to pain. Very extraordinary it would be, if these 
affections, so distinguishable in their causes, so different in 
their effects, should be confounded with each other, because 
vulgar use has ranged them under the same general title. 
Whenever I have occasion to speak of this species of 
relative pleasure, I call it delight ; and I shall take the best 
care I can to use that word in no other sense. I am satisfied 
the word is not commonly used in this appropriated significa- 
tion; but I thought it better to take up a word already 
known, and to limit itssignification, than to introduce a new 
one, which would not perhaps incorporate so well with the 
language. I should never have presumed the least altera- 
tion in our words, if the nature of the language, framed for 
the purposes of business rather than those of philosophy, 
and the nature of my subject, that leads me out of the com- 
mon track of discourse, did not in a manner necessitate me 
to it. I shall make use of this liberty with all possible cau- 
tion. AsI make use of the word delight to express the 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 223 


sensation which accompanies the removal of pain or danger, 
so, when I speak of positive pleasure, I shall for the most 
part call it simply pleasure. 


SECTION, 
JOY AND GRIEF 


IT must be observed, that the cessation of pleasure affects 
the mind three ways. If it simply ceases after having con- 
tinued a proper time, the effect is indifference; if it be 
abruptly broken off, there ensues an uneasy sense called dis- 
appointment ; if the object be so totally lost that there is no 
chance of enjoying it again, a passion arises in the mind 
which is called grief. Now there is none of these, not even 
grief, which is the most violent, that I think has any re- 
semblance to positive pain. The person who grieves suffers 
his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it: 
but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which no 
man ever willingly endured for any considerable time. That 
grief should be willingly endured, though far from a simply 
pleasing sensation, is not so difficult to be understood. It 
is the nature of grief to keepits object perpetually in its eye, 
to present it in its most pleasurable views, to repeat all the 
circumstances that attend it, even to the last minuteness; to 
go back to every particular enjoyment, to dwell upon each, 
and to find a thousand new perfections in all, that were not 
sufficiently understood before; in grief, the pleasure is still 
uppermost; and the affliction we suffer has no resemblance 
to absolute pain, which is always odious, and which we en- 
deavour to shake off as soonas possible. The ‘ Odyssey” of 
Homer, which abounds with so many natural and affecting 
images, has none more striking than those which Menelaus 
raises of the calamitous fate of his friends, and his own 
manner of feeling it. He owns, indeed, that he often gives 
himself some intermission from such melancholy reflections ; 


224 BURKE 


but he observes, too, that, melancholy as they are, they give 
him pleasure. 
"AAW Eurcne mavrac ev Odupdpevoc Kal ayebwr, 
TloAAdnug év peydporor xabjuevoc juetépocory, 
"Addote pév te you dpéva téprropa,aAdore 0 atte 
Tlatowar aiynpo¢ dé Képog Kpvepoio yéor0, 
Hom. Od. A. Ioo. 


“ Still in short intervals of pleasing woe, 
Regardful of the friendly dues I owe, 
I to the glorious dead, forever dear, 
Indulge the tribute of a grateful tear.” 


On the other hand, when we recover our health, when we 
escape an imminent danger, is it with joy that we are affected ? 
The sense on these occasions is far from that smooth and 
voluptuous satisfaction which the assured prospect of pleas- 
ure bestows. The delight which arises from the modifica- 
tions of pain confesses the stock from whence it sprung, in 
its solid, strong, and severe nature. 


SECTION VL 
OF THE PASSIONS WHICII BELONG TO SELF-PRESERVATION 


Most of the ideas which are capable of making a power- 
ful impression on the mind, whether simply of pain or 
pleasure, or of the modifications of those, may be reduced 
very nearly to these'two heads, self-preservation, and society ; 
to the ends of one or the other of which all our passions 
are calculated to answer. The passions which concern self- 
preservation, turn mostly on pain or danger. The ideas 
of pain, sickness, and death, fill the mind with strong emo- 
tions of horror; but life and health, though they put usina 
capacity of being affected with pleasure, make no such im- 
pression by the simple enjoyment. The passions therefore 
which are conversant about the preservation of the individual 
turn chiefly on pain and danger, and they are the most 
powerful of all the passions. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 225 


SECTION VII 


OF THE SUBLIME 


WHATEVER is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of 
pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort ter- 
rible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a 
manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that 
is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is 
capable of feeling. Isay the strongest emotion, because I am 
satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those 
which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the 
torments which we may be made to suffer are much greater in 
their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures which 
the most learned voluptuary could suggest, or than the liveli- 
est imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible 
body, could enjoy. Nay, Iam in great doubt whether any 
man could be found, who would earn a life of the most per- 
fect satisfaction at the price of ending it in the torments, 
which justice inflicted in a few hours on the late unfortunate 
regicide in France. But as pain is stronger in its operation 
than pleasure, so death is in general a much more affecting 
idea than pain; because there are very few pains, however 
exquisite, which are not preferred to death: nay, what 
generally makes pain itself, if I may say so, more painful, is, 
that it is considered as an emissary of this king of terrors. 
When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of 
giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain 
distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and 
they are, delightful, as we every day experience. The 


cause of this I shall endeavour to investigate hereafter. 
a5 


226 BURKE 
SECTION VIII 


OF THE PASSIONS WHICH BELONG TO SOCIETY 


THE other head under which I class our passions, is that 
of society, which may be divided into two sorts. First, the 
society of the sexes, which answers the purpose of propaga- 
tion ; and next, that more general society, which we have 
with men and with other animals, and which we may in some 
sort be said to have even with the inanimate world. The 
passions belonging to the preservation of the individual turn 
wholly on pain and danger : those which belong to genera- 
tion have their origin in gratifications and pleasures ; the 
pleasure most directly belonging to this purpose is of a 
lively character, rapturous and violent, and confessedly the 
highest pleasure of sense ; yet the absence of this so great 
an enjoyment scarce amounts to an uneasiness ; and, except 
at particular times, I do not think it affects at all. When 
men describe in what manner they are affected by pain and 
danger, they do not dwell on the pleasure of health.and the 
comfort of security, and then lament the loss of these satis- 
factions : the whole turns upon the actual pains and horrors 
which they endure. But if you listento the complaints of a 
forsaken lover, you observe that he insists largely on the 
pleasures which he enjoyed, or hoped to enjoy, and on the 
perfection of the object of his desires ; it is the loss which is 
always uppermost in his mind. The violent effects produced 
by love, which has sometimes been even wrought up to 
madness, is no objection to the rule which we seek to estab- 
lish. When men have suffered their imaginations to be long 
affected with any idea, it so wholly engrosses them as to shut 
out by degrees almost every other, and to break down every 
partition of the mind which would confine it. Any idea is 
sufficient for the purpose, as is evident from the infinite 
variety of causes, which give rise to madness: but this at 
most can only prove, that the passion of love is capable of 
producing very extraordinary effects, not that its extraor- 
dinary emotions have any connection with positive pain. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 227 


SECTION IX 


THE FINAL CAUSE OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE 
PASSIONS BELONGING TO SELF-PRESERVATION AND THOSE 
WHICH REGARD THE SOCIETY OF THE SEXES 


THE final cause of the difference in character between 
the passions which regard self-preservation, and those which 
are directed to the multiplication of the species, will illus- 
trate the foregoing remarks yet further ; and it is, I imagine, 
worthy of observation even upon its own account. As the 
performance of our duties of every kind depends upon life, 
and the performing them with vigour and efficacy depends 
upon health, we are very strongly affected with whatever 
threatens the destruction of either : but as we were not made 
to acquiesce in life and health, the simple enjoyment of 
them is not attended with any real pleasure, lest, satisfied 
with that, we should give ourselves over to indolence and 
inaction. On the other hand, the generation of mankind is 
a great purpose, and it is requisite that men should be 
animated to the pursuit of it by some great incentive. It is 
therefore attended with a very high pleasure; but as it is by 
no means designed to be our constant business, it is not fit 
that the absence of this pleasure should be attended with 
any considerable pain. The difference between men and 
brutes, in this point, seems to be remarkable. Men are at 
all times pretty equally disposed to the pleasures of love, 
because they are to be guided by reason in the time and 
manner of indulgingthem. Had any great pain arisen from 
the want of this satisfaction, reason, I am afraid, would find 
great difficulties in the performance of its office. But brutes 
that obey laws, in the execution of which their own reason 
has but little share, have their stated seasons; at such times 
it is notimprobable that the sensation from the want is very 
troublesome, because the end must be then answered, or be 
missed in many, perhaps forever; as the inclination returns 
only with its season. 


228 BURKE 


SECTION X 
OF BEAUTY 


THE passion which belongs to generation, merely as such, 
is lust only. This is evident in brutes, whose passions are 
more unmixed, and which pursue their purposes more di- 
rectly than ours. The only distinction they observe with 
regard to their mates, is that of sex. It is true, that they 
stick severally to their own species in preference to all 
others. But this preference, I imagine, does not arise from 
any sense of beauty which they find in their species, as Mr. 
Addison supposes, but from a law of some other kind, to 
which they are subject; and this we may fairly conclude, 
from their apparent want of choice amongst those objects to 
which the barriers of their species have confined them. But 
man, who is a creature adapted toa greater variety and in- 
tricacy of relation, connects with the general passion the 
idea of some social qualities, which direct and heighten the 

appetite which he has in common with all other animals; 
and as he is not designed like them to live at large, it is fit 
that he should have something to create a preference, and 
fix his choice; and this in general should be some sensible 
quality ; as no other can so quickly, so powerfully, or so 
surely produce its effect. The object therefore of this mixed 
passion, which we call love, is the beauty of the sex. Men 
are carried to the sex in general, as it is the sex, and by the 
common law of nature; but they are attached to particulars 
by personal beauty. I call beauty a social quality; for 
where women and men, and not only they, but when other 
animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding 
them (and there are many that do so), they inspire us with 
sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons ; 
we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a 
kind of relation with them, unless we should have strong 
reasons to the contrary. But to what end, in many cases, 
this was designed, I am unable to discover; for I see no 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 229 


greater reason fora connection between man and several 
animals who are attired in so engaging a manner, than be- 
tween him and some others who entirely want this attraction, 
or possess it in a far weaker degree. But it is probable that 
Providence did not make even this distinction, but with a 
view to some great end; though we can not perceive dis- 
tinctly what it is, as his wisdom is not our wisdom, nor our 
ways his ways. 


SECTION XI 
SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE 


THE second branch of the social passions is that which 
administers to society in general. With regard to this, I 
observe, that society, merely as society, without any partic- 
ular heightenings, gives us no positive pleasure in the en- 
joyment ; but absolute and entire solitude, that is, the total 
and perpetual exclusion from all society, isas great a positive 
pain as can almost be conceived. Therefore in the balance 
between the pleasure of general society, and the pain of 
absolute solitude, pain is the predominant idea. But the 
pleasure of any particular social enjoyment outweighs very 
considerably the uneasiness caused by the want of that 
particular enjoyment; so that the strongest sensations rel- 
ative to the habitudes of particular society are sensations of 
pleasure. Good company, lively conversations, and the 
endearments of friendship, fill the mind with great pleasure ; 
a temporary solitude, on the other hand, is itself agreeable. 
This may perhaps prove that we are creatures designed for 
contemplation as well as action; since solitude as well as 
society has its pleasures; as from the former observation we 
may discern, that an entire life of solitude contradicts the 
purposes of our being, since death itself is scarcely an idea 
of more terror. 


230 BURKE 


SECTION, XII 
SYMPATHY, IMITATION, AND AMBITION 


UNDER this denomination of society, the passions are of a 
complicated kind, and branch out into a variety of forms, 
agreeably to that variety of ends they are to serve in the 
great chain of society. The three principal links in this 
chain are sympathy, imitation, and ambition. 


SECTION XIIT 
SYMPATHY 


IT is by the first of these passions that we enter into the 
concerns of others; that we are moved as they are moved, 
and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators of almost 
anything which men can do or suffer. For sympathy must 
be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put 
into the place of another man, and affected in many respects 
as he is affected: so that this passion may either partake of 
the nature of those which regard self-preservation, and turn- 
ing upon pain may bea source of the sublime; or it may 
turn upon ideas of pleasure; and then whatever has been 
said of the social affections, whether they regard society in 
general, or only some particular modes of it, may be appli- 
cable here. It is by this principle chiefly that poetry, paint- 
ing, and other affecting arts, transfuse their passions from 
one breast to another, and are often capable of grafting a 
delight on wretchedness, misery, and death itself. It is a 
common observation, that objects which in the reality would 
shock, are in tragical, and such like representations, the 
source of a very high species of pleasure. This, taken asa 
fact, has been the cause of much reasoning. The satisfac- 
tion has been commonly attributed, first, to the comfort we 
receive in considering that so melancholy a story is no more 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 231 


than a fiction; and, next, to the contemplation of our own 
freedom from the evils which we see represented. I am 
afraid it is a practise much too common in inquiries of this 
nature, to attribute the cause of feelings which merely arise 
from the mechanical structure of our bodies, or from the 
natural frame and constitution of our minds, to certain con- 
clusions of the reasoning faculty on the objects presented to 
us; for I should imagine, that the influence of reason in pro- 
ducing our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is 
commonly believed. 


SECTION XIV 


THE EFFECTS OF SYMPATHY IN THE DISTRESSES OF 
OTHERS 


TO examine this point concerning the effect of tragedy in 
a proper manner, we must previously consider how we are 
affected by the feelings of our fellow-creatures in circum- 
stances of real distress. I am convinced we have a degree 
of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and 
pains of others; for let the affection be what it will in ap- 
pearance, if it does not make us shun such objects, if on the 
contrary it induces us to approach them, if it makes us dwell 
upon them, in this case I conceive we must have a delight 
or pleasure of some species or other in contemplating ob- 
jects of this kind. Do we not read the authentic histories 
of scenes of this nature with as much pleasure as romances 
or poems, where the incidents are fictitious? The pros- 
perity of no empire, nor the grandeur of no king, can so 
agreeably affect in the reading, as the ruin of the state of 
Macedon, and the distress of its unhappy prince. Such a 
catastrophe touches us in history as much as the destruction 
of Troy does in fable. Our delight, in cases of this kind, 
is very greatly heightened, if the sufferer be some excellent 
person who sinks under an unworthy fortune. Scipio and 


232 BURKE 


Cato are both virtuous characters; but we are more deeply 
affected by the violent death of the one, and the ruin of the 
great cause he adhered to, than with the deserved triumphs 
and uninterrupted prosperity of the other: for terror is a 
passion which always produces delight when it does not 
press too closely; and pity is a passion accompanied with 
pleasure, because it arises from love and social affection. 
Whenever we are formed by nature to any active purpose, 
the passion which animates us to it is attended with delight, 
or a pleasure of some kind, let the subject-matter be what it 
will; and as our Creator has designed that we should be 
united by the bond of sympathy, he has strengthened that 
bond by a proportionable delight ; and there most where our 
sympathy is most wanted,—in the distresses of others. If 
this passion was simply painful, we would shun with the 
greatest care all persons and places that could excite such a 
passion; as some, who are so far gone in indolence as not to 
endure any strong impression, actually do. But the case is 
widely different with the greater part of mankind; there is 
no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncom- 
mon and grievous calamity ; so that whether the misfortune 
is before our eyes, or whether they are turned back to it in 
history, it always touches with delight. This is not an un- 
mixed delight, but blended with no small uneasiness, The 
delight we have in such things hinders us from shunning 
scenes of misery; and the pain we feel prompts us to relieve 
ourselves in relieving those who suffer; and all this antece- 
dent to any reasoning, by an instinct that works us to its own 
purposes without our concurrence. | 


SECTION XV 
OF THE EFFECTS OF TRAGEDY 


IT is thus in real calamities. In imitated distresses the 
only difference is the pleasure resulting from the effects of 
imitation; for it is never so perfect, but we can perceive it is 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 233 


imitation, and on that principle are somewhat pleased with 
it. And indeed in some cases we derive as much or more 
pleasure from that source than from the thing itself. But 
then I imagine we shall be much mistaken if we attribute 
any considerable part of our satisfaction in tragedy to the 
consideration that tragedy is a deceit, and its representations 
no realities. The nearer it approaches the reality, and the 
further it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more per- 
fect is its power. But be its power of what kind it will, it 
never approaches to what it represents. Choose a day on 
which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy 
we have; appoint the most favourite actors; spare no cost 
upon the scenes and decorations; unite the greatest efforts 
of poetry, painting, and music; and when you have collected 
your audience, just at the moment when their minds are 
erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal 
of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoin- 
ing square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would 
demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts, 
and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy. I believe 
that this notion of our having a simple pain in the reality, 
yet a delight in the representation, arises from hence, that 
we do not sufficiently distinguish what we would by no means 
choose to do, from what we should be eager enough to see 
if it was once done. We delight in seeing things, which so 
far from doing, our heartiest wishes would be to see redressed. 
This noble capital, the pride of England and of Europe, I 
believe no man is so strangely wicked as to desire to see 
destroyed by aconflagration or an earthquake, though he 
should be removed himself to the greatest distance from the 
danger. But suppose such a fatal accident to have happened, 
what numbers from all parts would crowd to behold the 
ruins, and amongst them many who would have been con- 
tent never to have seen London in its glory! Nor is it, 
either in real or fictitious distresses, our immunity from them 
which produces our delight; in my own mind I can discover 
nothing like it. I apprehend that this mistake is owing to a 


234 BURKE 


sort of sophism, by which we are frequently imposed upon; 
it arises from our not distinguishing between what is indeed 
a necessary condition to our doing or suffering anything in 
general, and what is the cause of some particular act. Ifa 
man kills me with a sword, it is a necessary condition to this 
that we should have been both of us alive before the fact; 
and yet it would be absurd to say that our being both living 
creatures was the cause of his crime and of my death. So it 
is certain that it is absolutely necessary my life should be 
out of any imminent hazard, before I can take a delight in 
the sufferings of others, real or imaginary, or indeed in any- 
thing else from any cause whatsoever. But then it is a soph- 
ism to argue from thence that this immunity is the cause of 
my delight either on these or on any occasions. No onecan 
distinguish such a cause of satisfaction in his own mind, I 
believe ; nay, when we do not suffer any very acute pain, 
nor are exposed to any imminent danger of our lives, we can 
feel for others, whilst we suffer ourselves; and often then 
most when we are softened by affliction; we see with pity 
even distresses which we would accept in the place of our 
own, 


ee 


SECTION XVI 
IMITATION 


THE second passion belonging to society is imitation, or, 
if you will, a desire of imitating, and consequently a pleasure 
in it. This passion arises from much the same cause with 
sympathy. For as sympathy makes us take a concern in 
whatever men feel, so this affection prompts us to copy what- 
ever they do; and consequently we have a pleasure in imitat- 
ing, and in whatever belongs to imitation merely as it is such 
without any intervention of the reasoning faculty, but solely 
from our natural constitution, which Providence has framed 
in such a manner as to find either pleasure or delight, accord- 
ing to the nature of the object, in whatever regards the pur- 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 235 


poses of our being. Itis by imitation far more than by pre- 
cept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus, we 
acquire not only more effectually, but more pleasantly. This 
forms our manners, our opinions, our lives. It is one of the 
strongest links of society ; it is a species of mutual compli- 
ance, which all men yield to each other, without constraint to 
themselves, and which is extremely flattering to all. Here- 
in it is that painting and many other agreeable arts have laid 
- one of the principal foundations of their power. And since, 
by its influence on our manners and our passions, it is of such 
great consequence, I shall here venture to lay down a rule, 
which may inform us with a good degree of certainty when 
we are to attribute the power of the arts to imitation, or to 
our pleasure in the skill of the imitator merely, and when to 
sympathy, or some other cause in conjunction withit. When 
the object represented in poetry or in painting is such as we 
could have no desire of seeing in the reality, then I may be 
sure that its power in poetry or painting is owing to the 
power of imitation, and to no cause operating in the thing 
itself. So it is with most of the pieces which the painters 
call still-life. In these a cottage, a dunghill, the meanest 
and most ordinary utensils of. the kitchen, are capable of 
giving us pleasure. But when the object of the painting or 
poem is such as we should run to see if real, let it affect us 
with what odd sort of sense it will, we may rely upon it that 
the power of the poem or picture is more owing to the nature 
of the thing itself than to the mere effect of imitation, or to 
a consideration of the skill of the imitator, however excellent. 
Aristotle has spoken so much and so solidly upon the force 
of imitation in his Poetics, that it makes any further dis- 
course upon this subject the less necessary. 


236 BURKE 


SECTION XVII 
AMBITION 


ALTHOUGH imitation is one of the great instruments used 
by Providence in bringing our nature towards its perfection, 
yet if men gave themselves up to imitation entirely, and each 
followed the other, and so on in an eternal circle, it is easy 
to see that there never could be any improvement amongst ° 
them. Men must remain as brutes do, the same at the end 
that they are at this day, and that they were in the begin- 
ning of the world. To prevent this, God has planted in man 
a sense of ambition, and a satisfaction arising from the con- 
templation of his excelling his fellows in something deemed 
valuable amongst them. It is this passion that drives men 
to all the ways we see in use of signalizing themselves, and 
that tends to make whatever excites in a man the idea of 
this distinction so very pleasant. It has been so strong as 
to make very miserable men take comfort, that they were 
supreme in misery; and certain it is that, where we can not 
distinguish ourselves by something excellent, we begin to 
take a complacency in some singular infirmities, follies, or 
defects of one kind or other. It is on this principle that. 
flattery is so prevalent ; for flattery is no more than what 
raises in a man’s mind an idea of a preference which he has 
not. Now, whatever, either on good or upon bad grounds, 
tends to raise a man in his own opinion, produces a sort of 
swelling and triumph, that is extremely grateful to the 
human mind; and this swelling is never more perceived, nor 
operates with more force, than when without danger we are 
conversant with terrible objects ; the mind always claiming 
to itself some part of the dignity and importance of the 
things which it contemplates. Hence proceeds what Lon- 
ginus has observed of that glorying and sense of inward 
greatness, that always fills the reader of such passages in 
poets and orators as are sublime : it is what every man must 
have felt in himself upon such occasions. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 237 


SECTION XVIII 
THE RECAPITULATION 


To draw the whole of what has been said into a few dis- 
tinct points :—The passions which belong to self-preserva- 
tion turn on pain and danger ; they are simply painful when 
their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when 
we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually 
_ in such circumstances ; this delight I have not called pleas- 
sure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different 
enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever 
excites this delight, I call sublime. The passions belonging 
to self-preservation are the strongest of all the passions, 

The second head to which the passions are referred with 
relation to their final cause, issociety. There are two sorts of 
societies. The first is, the society of sex. The passion be- 
longing to this is called love, and it contains a mixture of 
lust ; its object is the beauty of women. The other is the 
great society with man and all other animals. The passion 
subservient to this is called likewise love, but it has no mix- 
ture of lust, and its object is beauty ; which is aname I shall 
apply to all such qualities in things as induce in usa sense 
of affection and tenderness, or some other passion the most 
nearly resembling these. The passion of love has its rise in 
positive pleasure ; it is, like all things which grow out of 
pleasure, capable of being mixed with a mode of uneasiness, 
that is, when an idea of its object is excited in the mind with 
an idea at the same time of having irretrievably lost it. This 
mixed sense of pleasure I have not called pain, because it 
turns upon actual pleasure, and because it is, both in its 
cause and in most of its effects, of a nature altogether dif- 
ferent. 

Next to the general passion we have for society, toa 
choice in which we are directed by the pleasure we have in 
the object, the particular passion under this head called sym- 


238 BURKE 


pathy has the greatest extent. The nature of this passion 
is, to put us in the place of another in whatever circumstance 
he is in, and to affect us in a like manner ; so that this pas- 
sion may, as the occasion requires, turn either on pain or 
pleasure ; but with the modifications mentioned in some 
cases in Section 11. Astoimitation and preference, nothing 
more need be said. 


SECTION XIX 
THE CONCLUSION 


I BELIEVED that an attempt to range and methodize some 
of our most leading passions would be a good preparative to 
such an inquiry as we are going to make in the ensuing dis- 
course. The passions I have mentioned are almost the only 
ones which it can be necessary to consider in our present 
design; though the variety of the passions is great, and 
worthy, in every branch of that variety, of an attentive 
investigation. The more accurately we search into the 
human mind, the stronger traces we everywhere find of His 
wisdom who made it. Ifa discourse on the use of the parts 
of the body may be considered as a hymn to the Creator; 
the use of the passions, which are the organs of the mind, 
can not be barren of praise to him, nor unproductive to our- 
selves of that noble and uncommon union of science and 
admiration, which a contemplation of the works of infinite 
wisdom alone can afford toarational mind; whilst, referring 
to him whatever we find of right or good or fair in our- 
selves, discovering his strength and wisdom even in our own 
weakness and imperfection, honouring them where we dis- 
cover them clearly, and adoring their profundity where we 
are lost in our search, we may be inquisitive without im- 
pertinence, and elevated without pride; we may be ad- 
mitted, if I may dare to say so, into the counsels of the 
Almighty by a consideration of His works. The elevation 
of the mind ought to be the principal end of all our studies; 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 239 


which, if they do not in some measure effect, they are of 
very little service to us. But, besides this great purpose, a 
consideration of the rationale of our passions seems to me 
very necessary for all who would affect them upon solid and 
sure principles. It is not enough to know them in general; 
to affect them after a delicate manner, or to judge properly 
of any work designed to affect them, we should know the 
exact boundaries of their several jurisdictions; we should 
pursue them through all their variety of operations, and 
pierce into the inmost, and what might appear inaccessible 
parts of our nature, 


Quod latet arcana non enarrabile fibra. 


Without all this it is possible for a man, after a confused 
manner sometimes to satisfy his own mind of the truth of 
his work; but he can never have a certain determinate rule 
to go by, nor can he ever make his propositions sufficiently 
clear to others. Poets, and orators, and painters, and those 
who cultivate other branches of the liberal arts, have, with- 
out this critical knowledge, succeeded well in their several 
provinces, and will succeed: as among artificers there are 
many machines made and even invented without any exact 
knowledge of the principles they are governed by. It is, I 
own, not uncommon to be wrong in theory, and right in 
practise: and we are happy that it is so. Men often act 
right from their feelings, who afterwards reason but ill on 
them from principle; but as it is impossible to avoid an at- 
tempt at such reasoning, and equally impossible to prevent 
its having some influence on our practise, surely it is worth 
taking some pains to have it just, and founded on the basis 
of sure experience. We might expect that the artists them- 
selves would have been our surest guides; but the artists 
have been too much occupied in the practise: the philoso- 
phers have done little; and what they have done, was mostly 
with aview to their own schemes and systems; and as for 
those called critics, they have generally sought the rule of 
the arts in the wrong place; they sought it among poems, 


240 BURKE 


pictures, engravings, statues, and buildings. But art can 
never give the rules that make an art. This is, I believe, the 
reason why artists in general, and poets, principally, have 
been confined in so narrow a circle: they have been rather 
imitators of one another than of nature; and this with so 
faithful an uniformity, and to so remote an antiquity, that 
itis hard to say who gave the first model. Critics follow 
them, and therefore can do little as guides. I can judge but 
poorly of anything, whilst I measure it by no other standard 
than itself. The true standard of the arts is in every man’s 
power; and an easy observation of the most common, some- 
times of the meanest things in nature, will give the truest 
lights, where the greatest sagacity and industry, that slights 
such observation, must leave us in the dark, or, what is worse, 
amuse and mislead us by false lights. In an inquiry it is 
almost everything to be oncein aright road. Iam satisfied 
I have done but little by these observations considered in 
themselves ; and I never should have taken the pains to digest 
them, much less should I have ever ventured to publish them 
if I was not convinced that nothing tends more to the corrup- 
tion of science than to suffer it tostagnate. These waters must 
be troubled, before they can exert their virtues. A man 
who works beyond the surface of things, though he may be 
wrong himself, yet he clears the way for others, and may 
chance to make even his errors subservient to the cause of 
truth. Inthe following parts I shall inquire what things 
they are that cause in us the affections of the sublime and 
beautiful, as in this I have considered the affections them- 
selves. I only desire one favour,—that no part of this dis- 
course may be judged of by itself, and independently of the 
rest ; for I am sensible I have not disposed my materials to 
abide the test of a captious controversy, but of a sober and 
even forgiving examination; that they are not armed at all 
points for battle, but dressed to visit those who are willing 
to give a peaceful entrance to truth. 


PART SECOND 


SECTION I 
OF THE PASSION CAUSED BY THE SUBLIME 


HE passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, 

when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonish- 
ment :and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its 
motions are suspended, with somedegree of horror! In this 
case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it can 
not entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that 
object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of 
the sublime, that, far from being produced by them, it an- 
ticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by an irresistible 
force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the effect of the 
sublime in its highest degree; the inferior effects are admi- 
ration, reverence, and respect. 

NOTE 
tale, SECL.. 3.4, 7. 


no 


SECTION II 
TERROR 


No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers 
of acting and reasoning as fear.1 For fear, being an ap- 
prehension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that 
resembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with 
regard to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terror 


be endued with greatness of dimensions or not; for it is 
16 241 


242 | BURKE 


impossible to look on anything as trifling, or contemptible, 
that may be dangerous. There are many animals, who, 
though far from being large, are yet capable of raising ideas 
of the sublime, because they are considered as objects of 
terror. As serpents and poisonous animals of almost all 
kinds. And to things of great dimensions, if we annex an 
adventitious idea of terror, they become without comparison 
greater. <A level plain of a vast extent on land, is certainly 
no mean idea; the prospect of sucha plain may be as ex- 
tensive as a prospect of the ocean; but can it ever fill the 
mind with anything so great as the ocean itself? This 
is owing to several causes; but it is owing to none more 
than this, that the ocean is an object of no smallterror. In- 
deed terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or 
latently, the ruling principle of the sublime. Several lan- 
guages bear a strong testimony to the affinity of these ideas. 
They frequently use the same word to signify indifferently 
the modes of astonishment or admiration and those of 
terror. O@dpfos isin Greek either fear or wonder ;; detvog is 
terrible or respectable ; a/d¢w, to reverence ortofear. Vereor 
in Latin is what a/déw is in Greek. The Romans used the 
verb stupeo, a term which strongly marks the state of an 
astonished mind, to express the effect either of simple fear, 
or of astonishment; the word attonitus (thunderstruck) is 
equally expressive of the alliance of these ideas; and do 
not the French étonnement, and the English astonishment 
and amazement, point out as clearly the kindred emotions 
which attend fear and wonder? They who have a more 
general knowledge of languages, could produce, I make no 
doubt, many other and equally striking examples. 


NOTE 
I. Part IV. sect. 3, 4, 5. 6. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 243 


SECTION III 
OBSCURITY 


To make anything very terrible, obscurity } seems in gen- 
eral to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any. 
danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of 
the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible of 
this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in 
all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts and 
goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds 
which give credit to the popular tales concerning such sorts 
of beings. Those despotic governments which are founded 
on the passions of men, and principally upon the passion of 
fear, keep their chief as much as may be from the public 
eye. The policy has been the same in many cases of re- 
ligion. Almost all the heathen temples were dark. Even 
_in the barbarous temples of the Americans at this day, they 
keep their idol in a dark part of the hut, which is consecrated 
to this worship. For this purpose too the Druids per- 
formed all their ceremonies in the bosom of the darkest 
woods, and in the shade of the oldest and most spreading 
oaks. No person seems better to have understood the secret 
of heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the 
expression, in their strongest light, by the force of a judi- 
cious obscurity than Milton. His description of deathin the 
second book is admirably studied; it is astonishing with 
what a gloomy pomp, with what a significant and expressive 
uncertainty of strokes and colouring, he has finished the 
portrait of the king of terrors: 

“ The other shape, 
If shape it might be called that shape had none 
Distinguishable, in member, joint, or limb ; 
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed; 
For each seemed either; black he stood as night; 
Fierce as ten furies; terrible as hell; 


And shook a deadly dart. What seemed his head 
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.” 


244 - | BURKE 


In this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, 
and sublime to the last degree. 


NOTE 


I. Part IV. sect. 14, 15, 16. 


SECTION IV 


OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CLEARNESS AND OBSCURITY 
WITH REGARD TO THE PASSIONS 


IT is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to make 
it affecting to the imagination. If I make a drawing of a 
palace, or a temple, or a landscape, I present a very clear 
idea of those objects; but then (allowing for the effect of 
imitation which is something) my picture can at most affect 
only as the palace, temple, or landscape, would have affected 
in the reality. On the other hand, the most lively and 
spirited verbal description I can give raises a very obscure 
and imperfect idea of such objects; but then it is in my 
power to raise a stronger emotion by the description than I 
could do by the best painting. This experience constantly 
evinces. The proper manner of conveying the affections of 
the mind from one to another is by words; there is a great 
insufficiency in all other methods of communication; and 
so far is a clearness of imagery from being absolutely neces- 
sary to an influence upon the passions, that they may be 
considerably operated upon, without presenting any image 
at all, by certain sounds adapted to that purpose; of which 
we have a sufficient proof in the acknowledged and powerful 
effects of instrumental music. In reality, a great clearness 
helps but little towards affecting the passions, as it is in 
some sort an enemy to all enthusiasms whatsoever. 

There are two verses in Horace’s “ Art of poetry ” that seem 
to contradict this opinion; for which reason I shall take a 
little more pains in clearing it up. The verses are, 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 245 


Segnius irritant animos demissa per aures, 
Quam quz sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus. 


On this the Abbé du Bos founds a criticism, wherein he 
gives painting the preference to poetry in the article of 
moving the passions; principally on account of the greater 
clearness of the ideas it represents. I believe this excellent 
judge was led into this mistake (if it be a mistake) by his 
system; to which he found it more conformable than I 
imagine it will be found to experience. I know several who 
admire and love painting, and yet who regard the objects of 
their admiration in that art with coolness enough in com. 
parison of that warmth with which they are animated by 
affecting pieces of poetry or rhetoric. Among the common 
sort of people, I never could perceive that painting had 
much influence on their passions. It is true that the best 
sorts of painting, as well as the best sorts of poetry, are not 
much understood in that sphere. But it is most certain that 
their passions are very strongly roused by a fanatic preacher, 
or by the ballads of ‘Chevy Chase,” or the “ Children in the 
Wood,” and by other little popular poems and tales that are 
current in that rank of life. I do not know of any paintings, 
bad or good, that produce the same effect. So that poetry, 
with all its obscurity, has a more general, as well as a more 
powerful dominion over the passions, than the other art. 
And I think there are reasons in nature, why the obscure 
idea, when properly conveyed, should be more affecting than 
the clear. It is our ignorance of things that causes all our 
admiration, and chiefly excites our passions. Knowledge 
and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but 
little. It is thus with the vulgar; and all men are as the 
vulgar in what they do not understand. The ideas of eter- 
nity, and infinity, are among the most affecting we have: 
and yet perhaps there is nothing of which we really under- 
stand so little, as of infinity and eternity. We do not any- 
where meet a more sublime description than this justly- 
celebrated one of Milton, wherein he gives the portrait of 
Satan with a dignity so suitable to the subject : 


246 BURKE 


“ He above the rest 
In shape and gesture proudly eminent 
Stood like a tower; his form had yet not lost 
All her original brightness, nor appeared 
Less than archangel ruined, and th’ excess 
Of glory obscured: as when the sun new risen 
Looks through the horizontal misty air 
Shorn of his beams; or from behind the moon 
In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds 
On half the nations; and with fear of change 
Perplexes monarchs.” 


Here is a very noble picture; and in what does this poetical 
picture consist? In images of a tower, an archangel, the 
sun rising through mists, or in an eclipse, the ruin of mon- 
archs and the revolutions of kingdoms. The mind is hur- 
ried out of itself, by a crowd of great and confused images ; 
which affect because they are crowded and confused. For 
separate them, and you lose much of the greatness ; and join 
them, and you infallibly lose the clearness. The images raised 
by poetry are always of this obscure kind; though in general 
the effects of poetry are by no means to be attributed to the 
images it raises; which point we shall examine more at large 
hereafter! But painting, when we have allowed for the 
pleasure of imitation, can only affect simply by the images 
it presents; and even in painting, a judicious obscurity in 
some things contributes to the effect of the picture; because 
the images in painting are exactly similar to those in nature ; 
and in nature, dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater 
power on the fancy to form the grander passions, than those 
have which are more clear anddeterminate. But where and. 
when this observation may be applied to practise, and how 
far it shall be extended, will be better deduced from the 
nature of the subject, and from the occasion, than from any 
rules that can be given. 

I am sensible that this idea has met with opposition, and 
is likely still to be rejected by several. But let it be con- 
sidered that hardly anything can strike the mind with its 
greatness, which does not make some sort of approach 
towards infinity ; which nothing can do whilst weare able to 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 247 


perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and to 
perceive its bounds, is oneand the same thing. A clear idea 
is therefore another name for a little idea. There is a pas- 
sage in the book of Job amazingly sublime, and this sub- 
limity is principally due to the terrible uncertainty of the 
thing described: “In thoughts from the visions of the night, 
when deep sleep falleth upon men, fear came upon me and 
trembling, which made all my bones toshake. Then a spirit 
passed before my face. The hair of my flesh stood up. It 
stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof; an 
image was before mine eyes; there was silence; and I heard 
a voice,—Shall mortal man be more just than God?” We 
are first prepared with the utmost solemnity for the vision; 
we are first terrified, before we are let even into the obscure 
cause of our emotion: but when this grand cause of terror 
makes its appearance, what is it? Is it not wrapt up in the 
shades of its own incomprehensible darkness, more awful, 
more striking, more terrible, than the liveliest description, 
than the clearest painting, could possibly represent it? When 
painters have attempted to give us clear representations of 
these very fanciful and terrible ideas, they have, I think, 
almost always failed; insomuch that I have been at a loss, 
in all the pictures I have seen of hell, to determine whether 
the painter did not intend something ludicrous. Several 
painters have handled a subject of this kind, with a view of 
assembling as many horrid phantoms as their imagination 
could suggest; but all the designs I have chanced to meet 
of the temptations of St. Anthony were rather a sort of 
odd, wild grotesques, than anything capable of producing a 
serious passion. In all these subjects poetry is very happy. 
Its apparitions, its chimeras, its harpies, its allegorical figures, 
are grand and affecting; and though Virgil’s Fame and 
Homer’s Discord are obscure, they are magnificent figures. 
These figures in painting would be clear enough, but I fear 
they might become ridiculous. 


NOTE 
Tr. Party. 


248 BURKE 


SECTION V 
POWER 


BESIDES those things which directly suggest the idea of 
danger, and those which produce a similar effect from a 
mechanical cause, I know of nothing sublime, which is not 
some modification of power. And this branch rises, as nat- 
urally as the other two branches, from terror, the common 
stock of everything that is sublime. The idea of power, at 
first view, seems of the class of those indifferent ones, which 
may equally belong to pain or to pleasure. But ‘in reality, 
the affection arising from the idea of vast power is extremely 
remote from that neutral character. For first, we must re- 
member? that the idea of pain, in its highest degree, is much 
stronger than the highest degree of pleasure; and that it 
preserves the same superiority through all the subordinate 
gradations. From hence it is, that where the chances for 
equal degrees of suffering or enjoyment are in any sort equal, 
the idea of the suffering must always be prevalent. And 
indeed the ideas of pain, and, above all, of death, are so very 
affecting, that whilst we remain in the presence of whatever 
is supposed to have the power of inflicting either, it is 
impossible to be perfectly free from terror. Again, we 
know by experience, that, for the enjoyment of pleasure, 
no great efforts of power are at all necessary; nay, we 
know that such efforts would go a great way towards de- 
stroying our satisfaction: for pleasure must be stolen, and 
not forced upon us; pleasure follows the will ; and therefore 
we are generally affected with it by many things of a force 
greatly inferior to our own. But pain is always inflicted by 
a power in some way superior, because we never submit to 
pain willingly. So that strength, violence, pain, and terror, 
are ideas that rush in upon the mind together. Look at a 
man, or any other animal of prodigious strength, and what 
is your idea before reflection? Is it that this strength will 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 249 


be subservient to you, to your ease, to your pleasure, to 
your interest in any sense? No; the emotion you feel is, 
lest this enormous strength should be employed to the pur- 
poses of rapine and destruction.2— That power derives all its 
sublimity from the terror with which it is generally accom- 
panied, will appear evidently from its effect in the very few 
cases, in which it may be possible to strip a considerable 
degree of strength of its ability tohurt. When you do this, 
you spoil it of everything sublime, and it immediately be- 
comes contemptible. An ox isacreature of vast strength; 
but he is an innocent creature, extremely serviceable, and 
not at all dangerous; for which reason the idea of an ox is 
by no means grand. A bull is strong too; but his strength 
is of another kind; often very destructive, seldom (at least 
amongst us) of any use in our business; the idea of a bull 
is therefore great, and it has frequently a place in sublime 
descriptions, and elevating comparisons. Let us look at an- 
other strong animal, in the two distinct lights in which we 
may consider him. The horse in the light of an useful beast, 
fit for the plough, the road, the draft ; in every social useful 
light, the horse has nothing sublime; but is it thus that we 
are affected with him, “ whose neck is clothed with thunder, 
the glory of whose nostrils is terrible, who swalloweth the 
ground with fierceness and rage, neither believeth that it is 
the sound of the trumpet?” In this description, the useful 
character of the horse entirely disappears, and the terrible 
and sublime blaze out together. We have continually about 
us animals of a strength that is considerable, but not perni- 
cious. Amongst these we never look for the sublime; it 
comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling 
wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the panther, or 
rhinoceros. Whenever strength is only useful, and em- 
ployed for our benefit or our pleasure, then it is never sub- 
lime; for nothing can act agreeably to us, that does not act 
in conformity to our will; but to act agreeably to our will, 
it must be subject to us, and therefore can never be the cause 
of a grand and commanding conception. The description 


260 BURKE 


of the wild ass, in Job, is worked up into no small sublimity, 
merely by insisting on his freedom, and his setting mankind 
at defiance; otherwise the description of such an animal 
could have had nothing noble in it. “Who hath loosed,” 
says he, “the bands of the wild ass? whose house I have 
made the wilderness and the barren land his dwellings. He 
scorneth the multitude of the city, neither regardeth he-the 
voice of the driver. The range of the mountains is his pas- 
ture.’ The magnificent description of the unicorn and of 
leviathan, in the same book is full of the same heightening 
circumstances: ‘‘ Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee? 
canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow ? 
wilt thou trust him because his strength is great P—Canst 
thou draw out leviathan with an hook? will he make a cove- 
nant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant forever ? 
shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him?” In 
short, wheresoever we find strength, and in what light soever 
we look upon power, we shall all along observe the sublime 
the concomitant of terror, and contempt the attendant on a 
strength that is subservient and innoxious. The race of 
dogs, in many of their kinds, have generally a competent 
degree of strength and swiftness; and they exert these and 
other valuable qualities which they possess, greatly to our 
convenience and pleasure. Dogs are indeed the most social, 
affectionate, and amiable animals of the whole brute crea- 
tion; but love approaches much nearer to contempt than is 
commonly imagined; and accordingly, though we caress 
dogs, we borrow from them an appellation of the most des- 
picable kind, when we employ terms of reproach; and this 
appellation is the common mark of the last vileness and con- 
tempt in every language. Wolves have not more strength 
than several species of dogs; but, on account of their unman- 
ageable fierceness, the idea of a wolf is not despicable; it is 
not excluded from grand descriptions and similitudes. Thus 
we are affected by strength, which is natural power. The 
power which arises from institution in kings and commanders, 
has the same connection with terror. Sovereigns are fre- 


‘ ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 251 


quently addressed with the title of dread majesty. And it 
may be observed, that young persons, little acquainted with 
the world, and who have not been used to approach men in 
power, are commonly struck with an awe which takes away 
the free use of their faculties. ‘When I prepared my seat 
in the street,” says Job, ‘the young men saw me, and hid 
themselves.” Indeed so natural is this timidity with regard 
to power, and so strongly does it inhere in our constitution, 
that very few are able to conquer it, but by mixing much in 
the business of the great world, or by using no small vio- 
lence to their natural dispositions. I know some people are 
of opinion, that no awe, no degree of terror, accompanies the 
idea of power; and have hazarded to affirm, that we can con- 
template the idea of God himself without any such emotion. 
I purposely avoided, when I first considered this subject, 
to introduce the idea of that great and tremendous Being, 
as an example in an argument so light as this; though 
it frequently occurred to me, not as an objection to, but as 
a strong confirmation of, my notions in this matter. I hope, 
in what I am going to say, I shall avoid presumption, where 
it is almost impossible for any mortal to speak with strict 
propriety. I say then, that whilst we consider the Godhead 
merely as he is an object of the understanding, which forms 
a complex idea of power, wisdom, justice, goodness, all 
stretched to a degree far exceeding the bounds of our com- 
prehension, whilst we consider the divinity in this refined 
and abstracted light, the imagination and passions are little 
or nothing affected. But because we are bound, by the con- 
dition of our nature, to ascend to these pure and intellectual 
ideas, through the medium of sensible images, and to judge 
of these divine qualities by their evident acts and exertions, 
it becomes extremely hard to disentangle our idea of the 
cause from the effect by which we are led to knowit. Thus, 
when we contemplate the Deity, his attributes and their 
operation, coming united on the mind, form a sort of sensi- 
ble image, and as such are capable of affecting the imagina- 
tion. Now, though in a just idea of the Deity, perhaps 


252 BURKE 


none of his attributes are predominant, yet, to our imagina- 
tion, his power is by far the most striking. Some reflection, 
some comparing, is necessary to satisfy us of his wisdom, his 
justice,and his goodness. To be struck with his power, it is 
only necessary that we should open oureyes. But whilst we 
contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of 
almighty power, and invested upon every side with omni- 
presence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, 
and are, in a manner, annihilated before him. And though 
a consideration of his other attributes may relieve, in some 
measure, our apprehensions ; yet no conviction of the justice 
with which it is exercised, nor the mercy with which it is tem- 
pered, can wholly remove the terror that naturally arises from 
a force which nothing can withstand. If we rejoice, we re- 
joice with trembling; and even whilst we are receiving bene- 
fits, we can not but shudder at a power which can confer 
benefits of such mighty importance. When the prophet 
David contemplated the wonders of wisdom and power 
which are displayed in the economy of man, he seems to be 
struck with a sort of divine horror, and cries out, “ fearfully 
and wonderfully am I made!” An heathen poet has a sen- 
timent of a similar nature; Horace looks upon it as the last 
effort of philosophical fortitude, to behold without terror 
and amazement, this immense and glorious fabric of the 
universe : 


Hunc solem, et stellas, et decedentia certis 
Tempora momentis, sunt qui formidine nulla 
Imbuti spectent. 


Lucretius is a poet not to be suspected of giving way to 
superstitious terrors ; yet, when he supposes the whole 
mechanism of nature laid open by the master of his philos- 
ophy, his transport on this magnificent view, which he has 
represented in the colours of such bold and lively poetry, is 
overcast with a shade of secret dread and horror : 


His ibi me rebus quaedam divina voluptas 
Percipit, atque horror; quod sic natura, tua vi 
Tam manifesta patens, ex omni parte retecta est. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 253 


But the Scripture alone can supply ideas answerable to 
the majesty of this subject. In the Scripture, wherever God 
is represented as appearing or speaking, everything terrible 
in nature is called up to heighten the awe and solemnity of 
the Divine presence. The Psalms, and the _ prophetical 
books, are crowded with instances of this kind. ‘‘ The earth 
shook,” says the Psalmist, ‘‘the heavens also dropped at the 
presence of the Lord.” And what is remarkable, the paint- 
ing preserves the same character, not only when he is sup- 
posed descending to take vengeance upon the wicked, but 
even when he exerts the like plenitude of power in acts of 
beneficenceto mankind. ‘Tremble, thou earth! at the pres- 
ence of the Lord ; at the presence of the God of Jacob; 
which turned the rock into standing water, the flint into a 
fountain of waters!” It were endless to enumerate all the 
passages, both in the sacred and profane writers, which 
establish the general sentiment of mankind, concerning the 
inseparable union of a sacred and reverential awe, with our 
ideas of the divinity. Hence the common maxim, Primusin 
orbe deos fecit timor. This maxim may be, as I believe it is, 
false with regard to the origin of religion. The maker of the 
maxim saw how inseparable these ideas were, without con- 
sidering that the notion of some great power must be always 
precedent to our dread of it. But this dread must neces- 
sarily follow the idea of such a power, when it is once 
excited in the mind. It is on this principle that true religion 
has, and must have, so large a mixture of salutary fear; and 
that false religions have generally nothing else but fear to 
support them. Before the Christian religion had, as it were, 
humanized the idea of the Divinity, and brought it some- 
what nearer to us, there was very little said of the love of 
God. The followers of Plato have something of it, and only 
something; the other writers of pagan antiquity, whether 
poets or philosophers, nothing at all. And they who con- 
sider with what infinite attention, by what a disregard of 
every perishable object, through what long habits of piety 
and contemplation it is that any man is able to attain an 


254 BURKE 


entire love and devotion to the Deity, will easily perceive that 
it is not the first, the most natural, and the most striking 
effect which proceeds from that idea. Thus we have traced 
power through its several gradations unto the highest of all, 
where our imagination is finally lost ; and we find terror, 
quite throughout the progress, its inseparable companion, 
_and growing along with it, as far as we can possibly trace 
them. Now, as power is undoubtedly a capital source of 
the sublime, this will point out evidently from whence its 
energy is derived, and to what class of ideas we ought to 
unite it. 
NorTeEs 
1. Part I. sect. 7. 2. Vide Part III. sect. 21. 


SECTION MI 
PRIVATION 


ALL general privations are great, because they are all terri- 
ble ; vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence. With what a 
fire of imagination, yet with what severity of judgment, has 
Virgil amassed all these circumstances, where he knows that 
all the images of a tremendous dignity ought to be united at 
the mouth of hell! Where, before he unlocks the secrets 
of the great deep, he seems to be seized with a religious 
horror, and to retire astonished at the boldness of his own 


design : 


Dii, quibus imperium est animarum, umbraeque sz/ezzis [ 
Et Chaos, et Phlegethon! loca xocte silentia late | 

Sit mihi fas audita loqui! sit numine vestro 

Pandere res alta terra et caligine mersas! 

Ibant obscuri, sola sub nocte, per umbram, 

Perque domos Ditis vacuas, et inania regna. 


“Ye subterraneous gods! whose awful sway 
The gliding ghosts, and s/ez¢t shades obey : 
O Chaos hoar! and Phlegethon profound ! 
Whose solemn empire stretches wide around ; 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 255 


Give me, ye great, tremendous powers, to tell 
Of scenes and wonders in the depth of hell ; 
Give me your mighty secrets to display 
From those é/ack realms of darkness to the day.” 
PITT. 


“ Obscure they went through dreary shades that led 
Along the waste dominions of the dead.’’ 
DRYDEN. 


SECTION VII 


VASTNESS 


GREATNESS! of dimension is a powerful cause of the sub- 
lime. This is too evident, and the observation too common, 
to need any illustration ; it is not so common to consider 
in what ways greatness of dimension, vastness of extent or 
quantity, has the most striking effect. For, certainly, there 
are ways and modes wherein the same quantity of extension 
shall produce greater effects than it is found to do in others. 
Extension is either in length, height, or depth. Of these the 
length strikes least ; a hundred yards of even ground will 
never work such an effect as a tower a hundred yards high, 
or a rock or mountain of that altitude. I am apt to imagine, 
likewise, that height is less grand than depth ; and that we 
are more struck at looking down from a precipice, than look- 
ing up at an object of equal height ; but of that Iam not 
very positive. A perpendicular has more force in forming 
the sublime, than an inclined plane, and the effects of a rug- 
ged and broken surface seem stronger than where it is 
smooth and polished. It would carry us out of our way to 
enter in this place into the cause of these appearances, but 
certain it is they afford a large and fruitful field of specula- 
tion. However, it may not be amiss to add to these remarks 
upon magnitude, that as the great extreme of dimension is 
sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in some measure 
sublime likewise ; when we attend to the infinite divisibility 
of matter, when we pursue animal life into these excessively 
small, and yet organized beings, that escape the nicest in- 


256 BURKE 


quisition of the sense ; when we push our discoveries yet 
downward, and consider those creatures so many degrees yet 
smaller, and the still diminishing scale of existence, in trac- - 
ing which the imagination is lost as well as the sense ; we 
become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minute- 
ness ; nor can we distinguish in its effect this extreme of 
littleness from the vast itself. For division must be infinite 
as well as addition ; because the idea of a perfect unity can 
no more be arrived at, than that of a complete whole, to 
which nothing may be added. 


NOTES 


1, Part IV. sect. 9. 


ne) dt Ghd 
INFINITY 


ANOTHER source of the sublime is infinity ; if it does not 
rather belong to the last. Infinity has a tendency to fill the 
mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most 
genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime. There are 
scarce any things which can become the objects of our senses, 
that are really and in their own nature infinite. But the eye 
not being able to perceive the bounds of many things, they 
seem to be infinite, and they produce the same effects as if 
they were really so. We are deceived in the like manner, if the 
parts of some large object are so continued to any indefinite 
number, that the imagination meets no check which may 
hinder its extending them at pleasure. 

Whenever we repeat any idea frequently, the iti bya 

sort of mechanism, repeats it long after the first cause has 
ceased to operate.) After whirling about when we sit down, 
the objects about us still seem to whirl. After a long suc- 
cession of noises, as the fall of waters, or the beating of forge- 
hammers, the hammers beat and the waters roar in the 
imagination long after the first sounds have ceased to affect 
it ; and they die away at last by gradations which are scarcely 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 257 


perceptible. If you hold up a straight pole, with your eye 
to one end, it will seem extended to a length almost incredi- 
ble2 Place a number of uniform and equidistant marks 
on this pole, they will cause the same deception, and seem 
multiplied without end. The senses, strongly affected in 
some one manner, can not quickly change their tenor, or 
adapt themselves to other things ; but they continue in their 
old channel until the strength of the first mover decays. 
This is the reason of an appearance very frequent in mad- 
men ; that they remain whole days and nights, sometimes 
whole years, in the constant repetition of some remark, some 
complaint, or song; which having struck powerfully on 
their disordered imagination in the beginning of their frenzy, 
every repetition reinforces it with new strength, and the 
hurry of their spirits, unrestrained by the curb of reason, 
continues it to the end of their lives. 


NOTES 
1. Part IV. sect. 11. 2.,Part IV. sect.:13. 


SECTION IX 
SUCCESSION AND UNIFORMITY 


SUCCESSION and uniformity of parts are what constitute 
the artificial infinite.’ 1. Succession ; which is requisite that 
the parts may be continued so long and in such a direction, 
as by their frequent impulses on the sense to impress the 
imagination with an idea of their progress beyond their 
actual limits. 2. Uniformity ; because, if the figures of the 
parts should be changed, the imagination at every change 
finds a check; you are presented at every alteration with 
the termination of one idea, and the beginning of another; 
by which means it becomes impossible to continue that unin- 
terrupted progression, which alone can stamp on bounded 
objects the character of infinity. It is in this kind of arti- 
ficial infinity, I believe, we ought to look for the cause why 
a rotund has such a noble effect.! For in a rotund, whether 


it be a building or a plantation, you can nowhere fixa bound- 
17 


258 BURKE 


ary; turn which way you will, the same object still seems to 
continue, and the imagination has no rest. But the parts 
must be uniform, as well as circularly disposed, to give this 
figure its full force; because any difference, whether it be in 
the disposition, or in the figure, or even in the colour of the 
parts, is highly prejudicial to the idea of infinity, which every 
change must check and interrupt, at every alteration com- 
mencing a new series. On the same principles of succession 
and uniformity, the grand appearance of the ancient heathen 
temples, which were generally oblong forms, with a range of 
uniform pillars on every side, will be easily accounted for. 
From the same cause also may be derived the grand effect 
of the aisles in many of our own old cathedrals. Theform ofa 
cross used in some churches seems to me not so eligible as 
the parallelogram of the ancients; at least, I imagine it is 
not so proper for the outside. For, supposing the arms of 
the cross every way equal, if you standin a direction parallel 
to any of the side walls, or colonnades, instead of a decep- 
tion that makes the building more extended than it is, you 
are cut off from a considerable part (two thirds) of its actual 
length; and, to prevent all possibility of progression, the 
arms of the cross taking a new direction, make a right angle 
with the beam, and thereby wholly turn the imagination 
from the repetition of the former idea. Or supposing the 
spectator placed where he may take a direct view of sucha 
building, what will be the consequence? the necessary con- 
sequence will be, that a good part of the basis of each angle 
formed by the intersection of the arms of the cross, must be 
inevitably lost ; the whole must of course assume a broken, 
unconnected figure ; the lights must be unequal, here strong, 
and there weak; without that noble gradation which the 
perspective always effects on parts disposed uninterruptedly 
in a right line. Some or all of these objections will lie 
against every figure of a cross, in whatever view you take it. 
I exemplified them in the Greek cross, in which these faults 
appear the most strongly ; but they appear in some degree 
in all sorts of crosses. Indeed, there is nothing more pre- 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 259 


judicial to the grandeur of buildings than to abound in 
angles ; a fault obvious in many; and owing to an inordinate 
thirst for variety, which, whenever it prevails, is sure to leave 
very little true taste. 

NOTE 


1. Mr. Addison, in the Spectators concerning the pleasures of the imagination, 
thinks it is because in the rotund at one glance you see half the building. This 
I do not imagine to be the real cause. 


ref LOAN ROM, 19,6 
MAGNITUDE IN BUILDING 


To the sublime in building, greatness of dimension seems 
requisite ; for on a few parts, and those small, the imagina- 
tion can not arise to any idea of infinity. No greatness in 
the manner can effectually compensate for the want of 
proper dimensions. There is no danger of drawing men into 
extravagant designs by this rule; it carries its own caution 
along with it. Because too great a length in buildings 
destroys the purpose of greatness, which it was intended to 
promote; the perspective will lessen it in height as it gains 
in length; and will bring it at last to a point ; turning the 
whole figure into a sort of a triangle, the poorest in its effect 
of almost any figure that can be presented to the eye. I 
have ever observed, that colonnades and avenues of trees of 
a moderate length were, without comparison, far grander 
than when they were suffered to run to immense distances. 
A true artist should put a generous deceit on the spectators, 
and effect the noblest designs by easy methods. Designs that 
are vast only by their dimensions are always the sign of a com- 
mon and lowimagination. No work of art can be great, but 
as it deceives ; to be otherwise is the prerogative of nature 
only. A good eye will fix the medium betwixt an excessive 
length or height (for the same objection lies against both), 
and a short or broken quantity: and perhaps it might be 
ascertained to a tolerable degree of exactness, if it was my 
purpose to descend far into the particulars of any art. 


260 BURKE 


SECTION XI 
INFINITY IN PLEASING OBJECTS 


INFINITY, though of another kind, causes much of our 
pleasure in agreeable, as well as of our delight in sublime 
images. The spring is the pleasantest of the seasons ; and 
the young of most animals, though far from being completely 
fashioned, afford a more agreeable sensation than the full- 
grown; because the imagination is entertained with the 
promise of something more, and does not acquiesce in the 
present object of the sense. In unfinished sketches of 
drawing, I have often seen something which pleased me be- 
yond the best finishing ; and this I believe proceeds from 
the cause I have just now assigned. 


SECTION, XU 
DIFFICULTY 


ANOTHER source of greatness is difficulty.1 When any 
work seems to have required immense force and labour to 
effect it, the idea is grand. Stonehenge, neither for disposi- 
tion nor ornament, has anything admirable ; but those huge 
rude masses of stone, set on end, and piled each on other, turn 
the mind on the immense force necessary for such a work. 
Nay, the rudeness of the work increases this cause of 
grandeur, as it excludes the idea of art and contrivance; for 
dexterity produces another sort of effect, which is different 


enough from this. 
NoTE 


1. Part IV. sect. 4, 5, 6. 


SECTION? XT 
MAGNIFICENCE 


MAGNIFICENCE is likewise a source of the sublime. A 
great profusion of things, which are splendid or valuable in 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 201 


themselves, is magnificent. The starry heaven, though it oc- 
curs so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an 
idea of grandeur. This can not be owing to the stars them- 
selves, separately considered. The number is certainly the 
cause. The apparent disorder augments the grandeur, for 
the appearance of care is highly contrary to our ideas of 
magnificence. Besides, the stars lie in such apparent confu- 
sion, as makes it impossible on ordinary occasions to reckon 
them. This gives them the advantage of a sort of infinity. 
In works of art, this kind of grandeur which consists in 
multitude, is to be very cautiously admitted ; because a pro- 
fusion of excellent things is not to be attained, or with too 
much difficulty ; and because in many cases this splendid 
confusion would destroy all use, which should be attended 
to in most of the works of art with the greatest care; besides, 
it is to be considered, that unless you can produce an ap- 
pearance of infinity by your disorder, you will have disorder 
only without magnificence. There are, however, a sort of 
fireworks, and some other things, that in this way succeed 
well, and are truly grand. There are also many descriptions 
in the poets and orators, which owe their sublimity to a 
richness and profusion of images, in which the mind is so 
dazzled as to make it impossible to attend to that exact 
coherence and agreement of the allusions, which we should 
require on every other occasion. I do not now remember a 
more striking example of this, than the description which is 
given of the king’s army in the play of Henry IV :— 


“ All furnished, all in arms, 
All plumed like ostriches that with the wind 
Baited like eagles having lately bathed : 
As full of spirit as the month of May, 
And gorgeous as the sun in midsummer, 
Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls. 
I saw young Harry with his beaver on 
Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury ; 
And vaulted with such ease into his seat, 
As if an angel dropped down from the clouds 
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus.” 


262 BURKE 


In that excellent book, so remarkable for the vivacity 
of its descriptions, as well as the solidity and penetration of 
its sentences, the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach, there is a 
noble panegyric on the high-priest Simon the son of Onias ; 
and it is a very fine example of the point before us :— 

‘“ How was he honoured in the midst of the people, in his 
coming out of the sanctuary! He was as the morning star 
in the midst of acloud, and as the moon at the full; as the 
sun shining upon the temple of the Most High, and as the 
rainbow giving light in the bright clouds: and as the bower 
of roses in the spring of the year, as lilies by the rivers of 
waters, and as the frankincense-tree in summer; as fire and 
incense in the censer, and as a vessel of gold set with pre- 
cious stones; as a fair olive-tree budding forth fruit, and as 
a cypress which groweth upto the clouds. When he put on 
the robe of honour, and was clothed with the perfection of 
glory, when he went up tothe holy altar, he made the gar- 
ment of holiness honourable. He himself stood by the hearth 
of the altar, compassed with his brethren round about; asa 
young cedar in Libanus, and as palm-trees compassed they 
him about. So were all the sons of Aaron in their glory, 
and the oblations of the Lord in their hands, etc.” 


SECTION XIV 
LIGHT 


HAVING considered extension, so far as it is capable of 
raising ideas of greatness ; colour comes next under considera- 
tion. All colours depend on light. Light therefore ought 
previously to be examined ; and with it its opposite, dark- 
ness. With regard to light, to make it a cause capable of 
producing the sublime, it must be attended with some cir- 
cumstances, besides its bare faculty of showing other objects. 
Mere light is too common a thing to make a strong im- 
pression on the mind, and without a strong impression noth- 
ing can be sublime. But such a light as that of the sun, im- 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 263 


mediately exerted on the eye, as it overpowers the sense, is 
avery great idea. Light of an inferior strength to this, if 
it moves with great celerity, has the same power ; for light- 
ning is certainly productive of grandeur, which it owes chiefly 
to the extreme velocity of its motion. A quick transition 
from light to darkness, or from darkness to light, has yet a 
greater effect. But darkness is more productive of sublime 
ideas than light. Our great poet was convinced of this; 
and indeed so full was he of this idea, so entirely possessed 
with the power of a well-managed darkness, that in describ- 
ing the appearance of the Deity, amidst that profusion of 
magnificent images, which the grandeur of his subject pro- 
vokes him to pour out upon every side, he is far from for- 
getting the obscurity which surrounds the most incompre- 
hensible of all beings, but 


“With majesty of darkness round 
Circles his throne.” 


And what is no less remarkable, our author had the secret 
of preserving this idea, even when he seemed to depart the 
farthest from it, when he describes the light and glory which 
flows from the Divine presence; a light which by its very 
excess is converted into a species of darkness :— 


“ Dark with excessive /ight thy skirts appear.” 


Here is an idea not only poetical in a high degree, but 
strictly and philosophically just. Extreme light, by over- — 
coming the organs of sight, obliterates all objects, so as in 
its effect exactly to resemble darkness. After looking for 
some time at the sun, two black spots, the impression which 
it leaves, seem to dance before our eyes. Thus are two ideas 
as opposite as can be imagined reconciled in the extremes of 
both; and both, in spite of their opposite nature, brought 
to concur in producing the sublime. And this is not the 
only instance wherein the opposite extremes operate equally 
in favour of the sublime, which in all things abhors medi- 
ocrity. 


264 | BURKE 


SECTION XV 
LIGHT IN BUILDING 


As the management of light is a matter of importance in 
architecture, it is worth inquiring, how far this remark is ap- 
plicable to building. I think, then, that all edifices calcu- 
lated to produce an idea of the sublime, ought rather to be 
dark and gloomy, and this for two reasons ; the first is, that 
darkness itself on other occasions is known by experience to 
have a greater effect on the passions than light. The second 
is, that to make an object very striking, we should make it 
as different as possible from the objects with which we have 
been immediately conversant; when therefore you enter a 
building, you can not pass into a greater light than you had 
in the open air; to go into one some few degrees less lumi- 
nous, can make only a trifling change; but to make the transi- 
tion thoroughly striking, you ought to pass from the greatest 
light, to as much darkness as is consistent with the uses of 
architecture. At night the contrary rule will hold, but for 
the very same reason; and the more highly a room is then 
illuminated, the grander will the passion be. 


SECTION XVI 


COLOUR CONSIDERED AS PRODUCTIVE OF THE SUBLIME 

AMONG colours, such as are soft or cheerful (except per- 
haps a strong red, which is cheerful) are unfit to produce 
grand images. An immense mountain covered with a shin- 
ing green turf, is nothing, in this respect, to one dark and 
gloomy ; the cloudy sky is more grand than the blue; and 
night more sublime and solemn than day. Therefore in 
historical painting, a gay or gaudy drapery can never have 
a happy effect: and in buildings, when the highest degree 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 265 


of the sublime is intended, the materials and ornaments 
ought neither to be white, nor green, nor yellow, nor blue, 
nor of a pale red, nor violet, nor spotted, but of sad or fus- 
cous colours, as black, or brown, or deep purple, and the like. 
Much of gilding, mosaics, painting, or statues, contribute but 
little to the sublime. This rule need not be put in practise, 
except where an uniform degree of the most striking sub- 
limity is to be produced, and that in every particular; for it 
ought to be observed, that this melancholy kind of great- 
ness, though it be certainly the highest, ought not to be 
studied in all sorts of edifices, where yet grandeur must be 
studied; in such cases the sublimity must be drawn from 
the other sources; with a strict caution however against 
anything light and riant ; as nothing so effectually deadens 
the whole taste of the sublime. 


SECTION XVII 


SOUND AND LOUDNESS 


THE eye is not the only organ of sensation by which a 
sublime passion may be produced. Sounds have a great 
power in these as in most other passions. I do not mean 
words, because words do not affect simply by their sounds, 
but by means altogether different. Excessive loudness alone 
is sufficient to overpower the soul, to suspend its action, 
and to fill it with terror. The noise of vast cataracts, rag- 
ing storms, thunder, or artillery, awakes a great and awful 
sensation in the mind, though we can observe no nicety or 
artifice in those sorts of music. The shouting of multitudes 
has a similar effect; and by the sole strength of the sound, 
so amazes and confounds the imagination, that, in this 
staggering and hurry of the mind, the best established 
tempers can scarcely forbear being borne down, and 
joining in the common cry, and common resolution of the 
crowd. 


266 BURKE 


SECTION XVIII 
SUDDENNESS 


A SUDDEN beginning, or sudden cessation of sound of 
any considerable force, has the same power. The attention 
is aroused by this; and the faculties driven forward, as it 
were, on their guard. Whatever, either in sights or sounds, 
makes the transition from one extreme to the other easy, 
causes no terror, and consequently can be no cause of great- 
ness. In everything sudden and unexpected, we are apt to 
start; that is, we have a perception of danger, and our na- 
ture rouses us to guard against it. It may be observed that 
a single sound of some strength, though but of short dura- 
tion, if repeated after intervals, has a grand effect. Few 
things are more awful than the striking of a great clock, 
when the silence of the night prevents the attention from 
being too much dissipated. The same may be said of 
a single stroke on a drum, repeated with pauses; and 
of the successive firing of cannon at a distance. All the 
effects mentioned in this section have causes very nearly 
alike. 


SECTION XIX 
INTERMITTING 


A LOW, tremulous, intermitting sound, though it seems, 
in some respects, opposite to that just mentioned, is pro- 
ductive of the sublime. It is worth while to examine this a 
little. The fact itself must be determined by every man’s 
own experience and reflection. I have already observed, 
that night ! increases our terror, more perhaps than anything 
else ; it is our nature, when we do not know what may hap- 
pen to us, to fear the worst that can happen: and hence it 
is that uncertainty is so terrible, that we often seek to be rid 
of it, at the hazard of a certain mischief. Now some low, 
confused, uncertain sounds, leave usin the same fearful anx- 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 267 


iety concerning their causes, that no light, or an uncertain 
light, does concerning the objects that surround us. 


Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna 
Est iter in sylvis. 


“ A faint shadow of uncertain light, 
Like as a lamp, whose life doth fade away; 
Or as the moon clothed with cloudy night 
Doth show to him who walks in fear and great affright.” 
SPENSER. 


But light now appearing, and now leaving us, and so off 
and on, is even more terrible than total darkness; and a sort 
of uncertain sounds are, when the necessary dispositions con- 
cur, more alarming than a total silence. 

NOTE 
1., Sect. ,3. 


SECTION XX 
THE CRIES OF ANIMALS 


SUCH sounds as imitate the natural inarticulate voices of 
men, or any animals in pain or danger, are capable of con- 
veying great ideas; unless it be the well-known voice of 
some creature, on which we are used to look with contempt. 
The angry tones of wild beasts are equally capable of caus- 
ing a great and awful sensation. 

Hinc exaudiri gemitus, ireeque leonum 

Vincla recusantum, et sera sub nocte rudentum; 

Setigerique sues, atque in przsepibus ursi 

Sevire; et formz magnorum ululare luporum. 
It might seem that these modulations of sounds carry some 
connection with the nature of the things they represent, 
and are not merely arbitrary ; because the natural cries of all 
animals, even of those animals with whom we have not been 
acquainted, never fail to make themselves sufficiently under- 
stood; this can not be said of language. The modifications 
of sound, which may be productive of the sublime, are almost 
infinite. Those I have mentioned are only a few instances 
to show on what principles they are all built. 


268 BURKE 


SECTION XXI 


SMELL AND TASTE-—BITTERS AND STENCHES 


SMELLS and tastes have some share too in ideas of great- 
ness; but it is a small one, weak in its nature, and confined 
in its operations. I shall only observe that no smells or 
tastes can produce a grand sensation, except excessive bitters, 
and intolerable stenches. It is true that these affections of 
the smell and taste, when they are in their full force, and 
lean directly upon the sensory, are simply painful, and ac- 
companied with no sort of delight; but when they are mod- 
erated, as in a description or narrative, they become sources 
of the sublime, as genuine as any other, and upon the very 
same principle ofa moderated pain. “A cup of bitterness” ; 
“to drain the bitter cup of fortune’’; “the bitter apples of 
Sodom”’; these are all ideas suitable to a sublime description. 
Nor is this passage of Virgil without sublimity, where the 
stench of the vapour in Albunea conspires so happily with 
the sacred horror and gloominess of that prophetic forest: 


’ 


At rex sollicitus monstris oracula Fauni 
Fatidici genitoris adit, lucosque sub alta 
Consulit Albunea, memorum quz maxima sacro 
Fonte sonat ; sevamgque exhalat opaca Mephitim. 


In the sixth book, and in a very sublime description, the 
poisonous exhaltation of Acheron is not forgotten, nor does 
it at all disagree with the other images amongst which it is 
introduced : 


Spelunca a/ta fuit vastogue tmmanis hiatu 
Scrupea, tuta /acu nigro, nemorumque éenebris ; 
Quam super haud ullz poterant impune volantes 
Tendere iter pennis: ¢alis sese halitus atris 
Faucibus effundens supera ad convexa ferebat. 


I have added these examples, because some friends for whose 
judgment I have great deference, were of opinion that if 
the sentiment stood nakedly by itself, it would be subject, 
at first view, to burlesque and ridicule; but this I imagine 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 269 


would principally arise from considering the bitterness and 
stench in company with mean and contemptible ideas, with 
which it must be owned they are often united; such an 
union degrades the sublime in all other instances as well as 
inthose. But it is one of the tests by which the sublimity of 
an image is to be tried, not whether it becomes mean when 
associated with mean ideas; but whether, when united 
with images of an allowed grandeur, the whole composition 
is supported with dignity. Things which are terrible are 
always great; but when things possess disagreeable qualities, 
or such as have indeed some degree of danger, but ofa 
danger easily overcome, they are merely odzous ; as toads 
and spiders. 


SECTION XXII 
FEELING—PAIN 


OF feeling little more can be said than that the idea of 
bodily pain, in all the modes and degrees of labour, pain, an- 
guish, torment, is productive of the sublime; and nothing 
else in this sense can produce it. I need not give here any 
fresh instances, as those given in the former sections abun- 
dantly illustrate a remark that, in reality, wants only an 
attention to nature, to be made by everybody. 

Having thus run through the causes of the sublime with 
reference to all the senses, my first observation (Sect. 7) will 
be found very nearly true; that the sublime is an idea be- 
longing to self-preservation ; that it is, therefore, one of the 
most affecting we have; that its strongest emotion is an 
emotion of distress: and that no pleasure} from a positive 
cause belongs to it. Numberless examples, besides those 
mentioned, might be brought in support of these truths, 
and many perhaps useful consequences drawn from them— 

Sed fugit interea, fugit irrevocabile tempus, 
Singula dum capti circumvectamur amore. 
NOTE 
1. Vide Part I. sect. 6. 


PART THIRD 


SECTION I 
OF BEAUTY 


|b is my design to consider beauty as distinguished from 
the sublime; and, in the course of the inquiry, to examine 
how far it is consistent with it. But previous to this, we 
must take a short review of the opinions already entertained 
of this quality ; which I think are hardly to be reduced to 
any fixed principles; because men are used to talk of beauty 
in a figurative manner, that is to say, in a manner extremely 
uncertain, and indeterminate. By beauty, I mean that 
quality, or those qualities in bodies, by which they cause 
love, or some passion similar to it. I confine this definition 
to the merely sensible qualities of things, for the sake of pre- 
serving the utmost simplicity in a subject, which must always 
distract us whenever we take in those various causes of sym- 
pathy which attach us to any persons or things from second- 
ary considerations, and not from the direct force which they 
have merely on being viewed. I likewise distinguish love 
(by which I mean that satisfaction which arises to the mind 
upon contemplating anything beautiful, of whatsoever nature 
it may be), from desire or lust; which is an energy of the 
mind, that hurries us on to the possession of certain objects, 
that do not affect us as they are beautiful, but by means alto- 
gether different. We shall have a strong desire for a woman 
of no remarkable beauty ; whilst the greatest beauty in men, 
or in other animals, though it causes love, yet excites nothing 
at all of desire. Which shows that beauty, and the passion 


caused by beauty, which I call love, is different from desire, 
270 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 271 


though desire may sometimes operate along with it; but it 
is to this latter that we must attribute these violent and tem- 
pestuous passions, and the consequent emotions of the body 
which attend what is called love in some of its ordinary 
acceptations, and not to the effects of beauty merely as it is 
such. 


SECTION II 
PROPORTION NOT THE CAUSE OF BEAUTY IN VEGETABLES 


BEAUTY hath usually been said to consist in certain pro- 
portions of parts. On considering the matter, I have great 
reason to doubt, whether beauty be at all an idea belonging 
to proportion. Proportion relates almost wholly to conveni- 
ence, as every idea of order seems to do; and it must there- 
fore be considered as a creature of the understanding, rather 
than a primary cause acting on the senses and imagination. 
It is not by the force of long attention and inquiry that we 
find any object to be beautiful ; beauty demands no assistance 
from our reasoning; even the will is unconcerned; the ap- 
pearance of beauty as effectually causes some degree of love 
in us, as the application of ice or fire produces the ideas of 
heat orcold. To gain something like a satisfactory conclu- 
sion in this point, it were well to examine what proportion 
is; since several who make use of that word do not always 
seem to understand very clearly the force of the term, nor 
to have very distinct ideas concerning the thing itself. Pro- 
portion is the measure of relative quantity. Since all 
quantity is divisible, it is evident that every distinct part into 
which any quantity is divided must bear some relation to 
the other parts, or to the whole. These relations give an 
origin to the idea of proportion. They are discovered by 
mensuration, and they are the objects of mathematical in- 
quiry. But whether any part of any determinate quantity 
be a fourth, or a fifth, or a sixth, or a moiety of the whole; 
or whether it be of equal length with any other part, or 


272 BURKE 


double its length, or but one half, is a matter merely indif- 
ferent to the mind; it stands neuter in the question: and it 
is from this absolute indifference and tranquillity of the 
mind, that mathematical speculations derive some of their 
most considerable advantages; because there is nothing to 
interest the imagination ; because the judgment sits free and 
unbiassed to examine the point. All proportions, every 
arrangement of quantity, is alike to the understanding, be- 
cause the same truths result to it from all; from greater, 
from lesser, from equality and inequality. But surely beauty 
is no idea belonging to mensuration; nor has it anything to 
do with calculation and geometry. If it had, we might then 
point out some certain measures which we could demonstrate 
to be beautiful, either as simply considered, or as related to 
others; and wecould call in those natural objects, for whose 
beauty we have no voucher but the sense, to this happy 
standard, and confirm the voice of our passions by the de- 
termination of ourreason. But since we have not this help, 
let us see whether proportion can in any sense be considered 
as the cause of beauty, as hath been so generally, and, by 
some, so confidently affirmed. If proportion be one of the 
constituents of beauty, it must derive that power either from 
some natural properties inherent in certain measures, which 
operate mechanically; from the operation of custom; or 
from the fitness which some measures have to answer some 
particular ends of conveniency. Our business therefore is 
to inquire, whether the parts of those objects, which are 
found beautiful in the vegetable or animal kingdoms, are con- 
stantly so formed according to such certain measures, as 
may serve to satisfy us that their beauty results from those 
measures, on the principle of a natural mechanical cause; or 
from custom; or, in fine, from their fitness for any determinate 
purposes. I intend to examine this point under each of these 
heads in theirorder. But before I proceed further, I hope it 
will not be thought amiss, if I lay down the rules which gov- 
erned me in this inquiry, and which have misled me in it, if I 
have gone astray. 1. If two bodies produce the same ora 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 273 


similar effect on the mind, and on examination they are found 
to agree in some of their properties, and to differ in others ; 
the common effect is to be attributed to the properties 
in which they agree, and not to those in which they differ. 
2. Not to account for the effect of a natural object from 
the effect of an artificial object. 3. Not to account for 
the effect of any natural object from a conclusion of our 
reason concerning its uses, if a natural cause may be assigned. 
4. Not to admit any determinate quantity, or any relation of 
quantity, as the cause of a certain effect, if the effect is pro- 
duced by different or opposite measures and relations; or if 
these measures and relations may exist, and yet the effect 
may not be produced. These are the rules which I have 
chiefly followed, whilst I examined into the power of pro- 
portion considered as a natural cause ; and these, if he thinks 
them just, I request the reader to carry with him through- 
out the following discussion; whilst we inquire, in the first 
place, in what things we find this quality of beauty; next, 
to see whether in these we can find any assignable propor- 
tions in such amanner as ought to convince us that our idea 
of beauty results from them. We shall consider this pleas- 
ing power as it appears in vegetables, in the inferior animals, 
and in man. Turning our eyes to the vegetable creation, 
we find nothing there so beautiful as flowers; but flowers 
are almost of every sort of shape, and of every sort of dis- 
position; they are turned and fashioned into an infinite 
variety of forms; and from these forms botanists have given 
them their names, which are almost as various. What pro- 
portion do we discover between the stalks and the leaves of 
flowers, or between the leaves and the pistils? How does 
the slender stalk of the rose agree with the bulky head under 
which it bends? but the rose is a beautiful flower; and can 
we undertake to say that it does not owe a great deal of its 
beauty even to that disproportion; the rose is a large 
flower, yet it grows upon a small shrub; the flower of the 
apple is very small, and grows upon a large tree; yet the 


rose and the apple blossom are both beautiful, and the plants 
18 


274 BURKE 


that bear them are most engagingly attired, notwithstanding 
this disproportion. What by general consent is allowed to 
be a more beautiful object than an orange-tree, flourishing 
at once with its leaves, its blossoms, and its fruit ? but it is 
in vain that we search here for any proportion between the 
height, the breadth, or anything else concerning the dimen- 
sions of the whole, or concerning the relation of the par- 
ticular parts to each other. I grant that we may observe in 
many flowers something ofa regular figure, and of a me- 
thodical disposition of the leaves. The rose has such a 
figure and such a disposition of its petals; but in an oblique 
view, when this figure is ina good measure lost, and the 
order of the leaves confounded, it yet retains its beauty ; the 
rose is even more beautiful before it is full blown; in the 
bud; before this exact figure is formed; and this is not the 
only instance wherein method and exactness, the soul of 
proportion, are found rather prejudicial than serviceable to 
the cause of beauty. 


SECTION III 
PROPORTION NOT THE CAUSE OF BEAUTY IN ANIMALS 


THAT proportion has but a small share in the formation 
of beauty is full as evident among animals. Here the great- 
est variety of shapes and dispositions of parts are well fitted 
to excite this idea. The swan, confessedly a beautiful bird, 
has a neck longer than the rest of his body, and but a very 
short tail: is this a beautiful proportion? We must allow 
that it is. But then what shall we say to the peacock, who 
has comparatively but a short neck, with a tail longer than 
the neck and the rest of the body taken together? How 
many birds are there that vary infinitely from each of these 
standards, and from: every other which you can fix; with 
proportions different, and often directly opposite to each 
other! and yet many of these birds are extremely beautiful ; 
when upon considering them we find nothing in any one 


/ 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 275 


part that might determine us, 4 priori, to say what the 
others ought to be, nor indeed to guess anything about 
them, but what experience might show to be full of disap- 
pointment and mistake. And with regard to the colours 
either of birds or flowers, for there is something similar in 
the colouring of both, whether they are considered in their 
extension or gradation, there is nothing of proportion to be 
observed. Some are of but one single colour; others have 
all the colours of the rainbow, some are of the primary colours, 
others are of the mixed ; in short, an attentive observer may 
soon conclude that there is as little of proportion in the 
colouring as in the shapes of these objects. Turn next to 
beasts; examine the head of a beautiful horse; find what 
proportion that bears to his body, and to his limbs, and 
what relation these have to each other; and when you have 
settled these proportions as a standard of beauty, then take a 
dog or cat, or any other animal, and examine how far the 
same proportions between their heads and their necks, be- 
tween those and the body, and so on, are found to hold; I 
think we may safely say, that they differ in every species, 
yet that there are individuals, found in a great many species 
so differing, that have a very striking beauty. Now, if it be 
allowed that very different, and even contrary forms and 
dispositions are consistent with beauty, it amounts I believe 
to a concession, that no certain measures, operating froma 
natural principle, are necessary to produce it; at least so 
far as the brute species is concerned. 


SEC FLON) EV 


PROPORTION NOT THE CAUSE OF BEAUTY IN THE HUMAN 
SPECIES 


THERE are some parts of the human body that are observed 
to hold certain proportions to each other ; but before it can be 
proved that the efficient cause of beauty lies in these, it must 
be shown that, wherever these are found exact, the person to 


276 - BURKE 


whom they belong is beautiful: I mean in the effect produced 
on the view, either of any member distinctly considered, or 
of the whole body together. It must be likewise shown, 
that these parts stand in such a relation to each other, that 
the comparison between them may be easily made, and that 
the affection of the mind may naturally result from it. For 
my part, I have at several times very carefully examined 
many of those proportions, and found them hold very nearly, 
or altogether alike in many subjects, which were not only 
very different from one another, but where one has been 
very beautiful, and the other very remote from beauty. 
With regard to the parts which are found so proportioned, 
they are often so remote from each other, in situation, nature, 
and office, that I can not see how they admit of any compari- 
son, nor consequently how any effect owing to proportion 
can result from them. The neck, say they, in beautiful 
bodies, should measure with the calf of the leg; it should 
likewise be twice the circumference of the wrist. And an 
infinity of observations of this kind are to be found in the 
writings and conversations of many. But what relation has 
the calf of the leg to the neck; or either of these parts to 
the wrist? These proportions are certainly to be found in 
handsome bodies. They are as certainly in ugly ones; as 
any who will take the pains to try may find. Nay, I do not 
know but they be least perfect in some of the most beauti- 
ful. You may assign any proportions you please to every 
part of the human body; and I undertake that a painter shall 
religiously observe them all, and notwithstanding produce, 
if he pleases, a very ugly figure. The same painter shall 
considerably deviate from these proportions, and produce a 
very beautiful one. And, indeed, it may be observed in the 
masterpieces of the ancient and modern statuary, that several 
of them differ very widely from the proportions of others, in 
parts very conspicuous and of great consideration ; and that 
they differ no less from the proportions we find in living men, 
of forms extremely striking and agreeable. And after all, 
how are the partisans of proportional beauty agreed amongst 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 277 


themselves about the proportions of the human body? 
Some hold it to be seven heads; some make it eight ; whilst 
others extend it even to ten: a vast difference in such a small 
number of divisions! Others take other methods of estimat- 
ing the proportions, and all with equal success. But are 
these proportions exactly the same in all handsome men? or 
are they at all the proportions found in beautiful women? 
Nobody will say that they are; yet both sexes are undoubt- 
edly capable of beauty, and the female of the greatest ; which 
advantage I believe will hardly be attributed to the superior 
exactness of proportion in the fair sex. Let us rest a 
moment on this point; and consider how much difference 
there is between the measures that prevail in many similar 
parts of the body, in the two sexes of this single species only. 
If you assign any determinate proportions to the limbs of a 
man, and if you limit human beauty to these proportions, 
when you find a woman who differs in the make and meas- 
ures of almost every part, you must conclude her not to be 
beautiful, in spite of the suggestions of your imagination; 
or, in obedience to your imagination, you must renounce 
your rules; you must lay by the scale and compass, and look 
out for some other cause of beauty. For if beauty be at- 
tached to certain measures which operate from a principle 
in nature, why should similar parts with different measures 
of proportion be found to have beauty, and this too in the 
very same species? But to open our view alittle, it is worth 
observing, that almost all animals have parts of very much 
the same nature, and destined nearly to the same purposes; 
a head, neck, body, feet, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth; yet 
Providence, to provide in the best manner for their several 
wants, and to display the riches of his wisdom and goodness 
in his creation, has worked out of these few and similar 
organs, and members, a diversity hardly short of infinite in 
their disposition, measures and relation. But, as we have 
before observed, amidst this infinite diversity, one particular 
is common to many species: several of the individuals which 
compose them are capable of affecting us with a sense of 


278 BURKE 


loveliness: and whilst they agree in producing this effect, 
they differ extremely in the relative measures of those parts 
which have produced it. These considerations were suffi- 
cient to induce me to reject the notion of any particular 
proportions that operated by nature to produce a pleasing 
effect; but those who will agree with me with regard to a 
particular proportion, are strongly prepossessed in favour of 
one more indefinite. They imagine, that although beauty 
in general is annexed to no certain measures common to the 
several kinds of pleasing plants and animals; yet that there 
is a certain proportion in each species absolutely essential to 
the beauty of that particular kind. If we consider the ani- 
mal world in general, we find beauty confined to no certain 
measures; but as some peculiar measure and relation of 
parts is what distinguishes each peculiar class of animals, it 
must of necessity be, that the beautiful in each kind will be 
found in the measures and proportions of that kind; for 
otherwise it would deviate from its proper species, and be- 
come in some sort monstrous: however, no species is so 
strictly confined to any certain proportions, that there is not 
a considerable variation amongst the individuals; and as it 
has been shown of the human, so it may be shown of the 
brute kinds, that beauty is found indifferently in all the pro- 
portions which each kind can admit, without quitting its 
common form: and it is this idea of acommon form that 
makes the proportion of parts at all regarded, and not the 
operation of any natural cause: indeed a little consideration 
will make it appear, that it is not measure, but manner, that 
creates all the beauty which belongs to shape. What light 
do we borrow from these boasted proportions, when we study 
ornamental design? It seems amazing to me, that artists, if 
they were as well convinced as they pretend to be, that pro- 
portion is a principal cause of beauty, have not by them 
at all times accurate measurements of all sorts of beautiful 
animals to help them to proper proportions, when they 
would contrive anything elegant; especially as they fre- 
quently assert that it is from an observation of the beauti- 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 279 


ful in nature they direct their practise. I know that it has 
been said long since, and echoed backward and forward from 
one writer to another a thousand times, that the proportions 
of building have been taken from those of the human 
body. To make this forced analogy complete, they repre- 
sent a man with his arms raised and extended at full length, 
and then describe a sort of square, asit is formed by passing 
lines along the extremities of this strange figure. But it ap- 
pears very clearly to me that the human figure never supplied 
the architect with any of his ideas. For, in the first place, 
men are very rarely seen in this strained posture; it is not 
natural to them; neither is it at all becoming. Secondly, 
the view of the human figure so disposed, does not naturally 
suggest the idea of a square, but rather of a cross; as that 
large space between the arms and the ground must be filled 
with something before it can make anybody think of a square. 
Thirdly, several buildings are by no means of the form of 
that particular square, which are notwithstanding planned by 
the best architects, and produce an effect altogether as good, 
and perhaps a better. And certainly nothing could be more 
unaccountably whimsical, than for an architect to model his 
performance by the human figure, since no two things can 
have less resemblance or analogy, than a man, and a house 
or temple: do we need to observe that their purposes are 
entirely different? What I am apt to suspect is this: that 
these analogies were devised to give credit to the works of 
art, by showing a conformity between them and the noblest 
works in nature; not that the latter served at all to supply 
hints for the perfection of the former. And I am the more 
fully convinced, that the patrons of proportion have trans- 
ferred their artificial ideas to nature, and not borrowed from 
thence the proportions they use in works of art ; because in 
any discussion of this subject they always quit as soon as 
possible the open field of natural beauties, the animal and 
vegetable kingdoms, and fortify themselves within the artifi- 
cial lines and angles of architecture. For there is in man- 
kind an unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their 


280 BURKE 


views, and their works, the measure of excellence in every- 
thing whatsoever. Therefore having observed that their 
dwellings were most commodious and firm when they were 
thrown into regular figures, with parts answerable to each 
other; they transferred these ideas to their gardens; they 
turned their trees into pillars, pyramids, and obelisks; they 
formed their hedges into so many green walls, and fashioned 
their walks into squares, triangles, and other mathematical 
figures, with exactness and symmetry; and they thought, if 
they were not imitating, they were at least improving nature, 
and teaching her to know her business. But nature has at last 
escaped from their discipline and their fetters; and our gar- 
dens, if nothing else, declare, we begin to feel that mathemati- 
cal ideas are not the true measures of beauty. And surely they 
are fullas little soin the animal as the vegetable world. For 
is it not extraordinary, that in these fine descriptive pieces, 
these innumerable odes and elegies which are in the mouths 
of allthe world, and many of which have been the entertain- 
ment of ages, that in these pieces which describe love with such 
a passionate energy, and represent its object in such an infinite 
variety of lights, not one word is said of proportion, if it be, 
what some insist it is, the principal component of beauty; 
whilst, at the same time, several other qualities are very fre- 
quently and warmly mentioned? But if proportion has not 
this power, it may appear odd how men came originally to be 
so prepossessed in its favour. It arose, I imagine, from the 
fondness I have just mentioned, which men bear so remark- 
ably to their own works and notions; it arose from false 
reasonings on the effects of the customary figure of animals; 
it arose from the Platonic theory of fitness and aptitude. 
For which reason, in the next section, I shall consider the 
effects of custom in the figure of animals; and afterwards 
the idea of fitness: since if proportion does not operate by 
a natural power attending some measures, it must be either 
by custom, or the idea of utility ; there is no other way. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 281 


SECTION, V 
PROPORTION FURTHER CONSIDERED 


Ir I am not mistaken, a great deal of the prejudice in 
favour of proportion has arisen, not so much from the obser- 
vation of any certain measures found in beautiful bodies, as 
from a wrong idea of the relation which deformity bears to 
beauty, to which it has been considered as the opposite; on 
this principle it was concluded that where the causes of 
deformity were removed, beauty must naturally and neces- 
sarily be introduced. This I believe is a mistake. For 
deformity is opposed not to beauty, but to the complete 
common form. If one of the legs of a man be found shorter 
than the other, the man is deformed; because there is some- 
thing wanting to complete the whole idea we form of a man; 
and this has the same effect in natural faults, as maiming 
and mutilation produce from accidents. So if the back be 
humped, the man is deformed; because his back has an un- 
usual figure, and what carries with it the idea of some dis- 
ease or misfortune ; so if a man’s neck be considerably longer 
or shorter than usual, we say he is deformed in that part, 
because men are not commonly made in that manner. But 
surely every hour’s experience may convince us that a man 
may have his legs of an equal length, and resembling each 
other in all respects, and his neck of a just size, and his back 
quite straight, without having at the same time the least 
perceivable beauty. Indeed beauty is so far from belonging 
to the idea of custom, that in reality what affects us in that 
manner is extremely rare and uncommon. The beautiful 
strikes us as much by its novelty as the deformed itself. It 
is thus in those species of animals with which we are ac- 
quainted; and if one of a new species were represented, we 
should by no means wait until custom had settled an idea 
of proportion, before we decided concerning its beauty or 
ugliness: which shows that the general idea of beauty can 
be no more owing to customary than to natural proportion. 


282 BURKE 


Deformity arises from the want of the common proportions; 
but the necessary result of their existence in any object is 
not beauty. If we suppose proportion in natural things to 
be relative to custom and use, the nature of use and custom 
will show that beauty, which is a positive and powerful 
quality, can not result from it. We are so wonderfully 
formed, that, whilst we are creatures vehemently desirous of 
novelty, we are as strongly attached to habit and custom. 
But it is the nature of things which hold us by custom, to 
affect us very little whilst we are in possession of them, but 
strongly when they are absent. JI remember to have fre- 
quented a certain place, every day for a long time together; 
and I may truly say that, so far from finding pleasure in it, I 
was affected with a sort of weariness and disgust; I came, 
I went, I returned, without pleasure; yet if by any means I 
passed by the usual time of my going thither, I was remark- 
ably uneasy, and was not quiet till I had got into my old 
track. They who use snuff, take it almost without being 
sensible that they take it, and the acute sense of smell is 
deadened, so as to feel hardly anything from so sharp a 
stimulus; yet deprive the snuff-taker of his box, and he is 
the most uneasy mortal in the world. Indeed so far are use 
and habit from being causes of pleasure merely as such, that 
the effect of constant use is to make all things of whatever 
kind entirely unaffecting. For as use at last takes off the 
painful effect of many things, it reduces the pleasurable 
effect in others in the same manner, and brings both toa 
sort of mediocrity and indifference. Very justly is use 
called a second nature; and our natural and common state 
is one of absolute indifference, equally prepared for pain or 
pleasure. But when we are thrown out of this state, or de- 
prived of anything requisite to maintain us in it; when this 
chance does not happen by pleasure from some mechanical 
cause, we are always hurt. It is so with the second nature, 
custom, in all things which relate to it. Thus the want of 
the usual proportions in men and other animals is sure to 
disgust, though their presence is by no means any cause of 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 283 


real pleasure. It is true that the proportions laid down as 
causes of beauty in the human body, are frequently found in 
beautiful ones, because they are generally found in all man- 
kind ; but if it can be shown too that they are found with- 
out beauty, and that beauty frequently exists without them, 
and that this beauty, where it exists, always can be assigned 
to other less equivocal causes, it will naturally lead us to 
conclude that proportion and beauty are not ideas of the 
same nature. The true opposite to beauty is not dispropor- 
tion or deformity, but ugliness: and as it proceeds from 
causes opposite to those of positive beauty, we can not con- 
sider it until we come to treat of that. Between beauty and 
ugliness there is a sort of mediocrity, in which the assigned 
proportions are most commonly found; but this has no 
effect upon the passions. 


SECTION: VI 
FITNESS NOT THE CAUSE OF BEAUTY 


IT is said that the idea of utility, or of a part’s being well 
adapted to answer its end, is the cause of beauty, or indeed 
beauty itself. If it were not for this opinion, it had been 
impossible for the doctrine of proportion to have held its 
ground very long; the world would be soon weary of hearing 
of measures which related to nothing, either of a natural 
principle, or of a fitness to answer some end; the idea 
which mankind most commonly conceive of proportion, is 
the suitableness of means to certain ends, and, where this is 
not the question, very seldom trouble themselves about the 
effect of different measures of things. Therefore it was 
necessary for this theory to insist that not only artificial, but 
natural, objects, took their beauty from the fitness of the 
parts for their several purposes. But in framing this theory, 
Iam apprehensive that experience was not sufficiently con- 
sulted. For, on that principle, the wedge-like snout of a swine, 
with its tough cartilage at the end, the little sunk eyes, and 


284 BURKE 


the whole make of the head, so well adapted to its offices of 
digging and rooting, would be extremely beautiful. The 
great bag hanging tothe bill of a pelican, a thing highly use- 
ful to this animal, would be likewise as beautiful in our eyes. 
The hedge-hog, so well secured against all assaults by his 
prickly hide, and the porcupine with his missile quills, would 
be then considered as creatures of no small elegance. There 
are few animals whose parts are better contrived than those 
of a monkey: he has the hands of a man, joined to the 
springy limbs of a beast; he is admirably calculated for run- 
ning, leaping, grappling and climbing; and yet there are 
few animals which seem to have less beautyin the eyes of 
all mankind. I need say little on the trunk of the elephant, of 
such various usefulness, and which is so far from contributing 
to his beauty. How well-fitted is the wolf for running and 
leaping! how admirably is the lion armed for battle! but 
will any one therefore call the elephant, the wolf, and the 
lion, beautiful animals? I believe nobody will think the 
form of a man’s leg so well adapted to running, as those of 
a horse, a dog, a deer, and several other creatures; at least 
they have not that appearance : yet, I believe, a well-fashioned 
human leg will be allowed to far exceed all these in beauty. 
If the fitness of parts was what constituted the loveliness of 
their form, the actual employment of them would, un- 
doubtedly much augment it; but this, though it is some- 
times so upon another principle, is far from being always the 
case. A bird on the wing is not so beautiful as when it is 
perched ; nay, there are several of the domestic fowls which 
are seldom seen to fly, and which are nothing the less beautiful 
on that account; yet birdsare so extremely different in their 
form from the beast and human kinds, that you can not, on the 
principle of fitness, allow them anything agreeable, but in con- 
sideration of their parts being designed for quite other pur- 
poses. I never in my life chanced to see a peacock fly ; and 
yet before, very long before I considered any aptitude in his 
form for the aérial life, I was struck with the extreme beauty 
which raises that bird above many of the best flying fowls in 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 285 


the world; though, for anything I saw, his way of living was 
much like that of the swine, which fed in the farm-yard along 
with him. The same may be said of cocks, hens, and the like ; 
they are of the flying kind in figure; in their manner of 
moving not very different from men and beasts. To leave 
these foreign examples; if beauty in our own species was 
annexed to use, men would be much more lovely than 
women; and strength and agility would be considered as the 
only beauties. But to call strength by the name of beauty, to 
have but one denomination for the qualities of a Venus and 
Hercules, so totally different in almost all respects, is surely 
a strange confusion of ideas, or abuse of words. The cause 
of this confusion, I imagine, proceeds from our frequently 
perceiving the parts of the human and other animal bodies 
to be at once very beautiful, and very well adapted to their 
purposes ; and we are deceived by a sophism, which makes 
us take that for a cause which is only a concomitant: this 
is the sophism of the fly; who imagined he raised a great 
dust, because he stood upon the chariot that really raised it. 
The stomach, the lungs, the liver, as well as other parts, are 
incomparably well adapted to their purposes; yet they are 
far from having any beauty. Again, many things are very 
beautiful, in which it is impossible to discern any idea of 
use. And I appeal to the first and most natural feelings of 
mankind, whether on beholding a beautiful eye, or a well- 
fashioned mouth, or a well-turned leg, any ideas of their 
being well fitted for seeing, eating, or running, ever present 
themselves. What idea of use is it that flowers excite, the 
most beautiful part of the vegetable world? It is true that 
the infinitely wise and good Creator has, of his bounty, fre- 
quently joined beauty to those things which he has made 
useful to us ; but this does not prove that an idea of use and 
beauty are thesame thing, or that they are any way depend- 
ent on each other. 


286 BURKE 


SECTION; VI! 
THE REAL EFFECTS OF FITNESS 


WHEN I excluded proportion and fitness from any share 
in beauty, I did not by any means intend to say that they 
were of no value, or that they ought to be disregarded in 
works of art. Works of art are the proper sphere of their 
power ; and here it is that they have their full effect. When- 
ever the wisdom of our Creator intended that we should be 
affected with anything, he did not confide the execution of 
his design to the languid and precarious operation of our 
reason; but he endued it with powers and properties that 
prevent the understanding, and even the will; which, seiz- 
ing upon the senses and imagination, captivate the soul, 
before the understanding is ready either to join with them, 
or to oppose them. It is by a long deduction, and much 
study, that we discover the adorable wisdom of God in his 
works: when we discover it the effect is very different, not 
only in the manner of acquiring it, but in its own nature, 
from that which strikes us without any preparation from the 
sublime or the beautiful. How different is the satisfaction 
of an anatomist, who discovers the use of the muscles and of 
the skin, the excellent contrivance of the one for the various 
movements of the body, and the wonderful texture of the 
other, at once a general covering, and at once a general out- 
let as well as inlet ; how different is this from the affection 
which possesses an ordinary man at the sight of a delicate, 
smooth skin, and all the other parts of beauty, which require 
no investigation to be perceived! Inthe former case, whilst 
we look up to the Maker with admiration and praise, the 
object which causes it may be odious and distasteful ; the 
latter very often so touches us by its power on the imagina- 
tion, that we examine but little into the artifice of its con- 
trivance; and we have need of a strong effort of our reason 
to disentangle our minds from the allurements of the object, 
to a consideration of that wisdom which invented so power- 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 287 


fula machine. The effect of proportion and fitness, at least 
so far as they proceed from a mere consideration of the work 
itself, produce approbation, the acquiescence of the under- 
standing, but not love, nor any passion of that species. 
When we examine the structure of a watch, when we come 
to know thoroughly the use of every part of it, satisfied as 
we are with the fitness of the whole, we are far enough from 
perceiving anything like beauty in the watch-work itself; 
but let us look on the case, the labour of some curious artist 
in engraving, with little or no idea of use, we shall have a 
much livelier idea of beauty than we ever could have had 
from the watch itself, though the masterpiece of Graham. 
In beauty, as I said, the effect is previous to any knowledge 
of the use; but to judge of proportion, we must know the 
end for which any work is designed. According to the end, 
the proportion varies. Thus there is one proportion of a 
tower, another of a house; one proportion of a gallery, 
another of a hall, another of a chamber. To judge of the 
proportions of these, you must be first acquainted with the 
purposes for which they were designed. Good sense and 
experience acting together, find out what is fit to be done 
in every work ofart. Wearerational creatures, and inall our 
works we ought to regard their end and purpose; the grati- 
fication of any passion, how innocent soever, ought only to 
be of secondary consideration. Herein is placed the real 
power of fitness and proportion ; they operate on the under- 
standing considering them, which approves the work and 
acquiesces init. The passions, and the imagination which 
principally raises them, have here very little to do. When 
a room appears inits original nakedness, bare walls and a 
plain ceiling: let its proportion be ever so excellent, it 
pleases very little; a cold approbation is the utmost we can 
reach; a much worse proportioned room with elegant mould- 
ings and fine festoons, glasses, and other merely ornamental 
furniture, will make the imagination revolt against the rea- 
son; it will please much more than the naked proportion 
of the first room, which the understanding has so much 


288 BURKE 


approved, as admirably fitted for its purposes. What I have 
here said and before concerning proportion, is by no means 
to persuade people absurdly to neglect the idea of use in 
the works of art.. It is only to show that these excellent 
things, beauty and proportion, are not the same: not that 
they should either of them be disregarded. 


SEC ULON  VALUL 
THE RECAPITULATION 


ON the whole; if such parts in human bodies as are found 
proportioned, were likewise constantly found beautiful, as 
they certainly are not; or if they were so situated, as that a 
pleasure might flow from the comparison, which they seldom 
are; or if any assignable proportions were found, either in 
plants or animals, which were always attended with beauty, 
which never was the case; or, if, where parts were well 
adapted to their purposes, they were constantly beautiful, 
and when no use appeared, there was no beauty, which is 
contrary to all experience; we might conclude that beauty 
consisted in proportion or utility. But since, in all respects, 
the case is quite otherwise ; we may be satisfied that beauty 
does not depend on these, let it owe its origin to what else 
it will. 


SECTION IX 
PERFECTION NOT THE CAUSE OF BEAUTY 


THERE is another notion current, pretty closely allied 
to the former; that perfection is the constituent cause of 
beauty. This opinion has been made to extend much 
further than to sensible objects. But in these, so far is per- 
fection, considered as such, from being the cause of beauty ; 
that this quality, where it is highest, in the female sex, 
almost always carries with it an idea of weakness and imper- 
fection. Women are very sensible of this; for which reason 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 289 


they learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit 
weakness, and even sickness. In all this they are guided by 
nature. Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty. 
Blushing has little less power; and modesty in general, 
which is a tacit allowance of imperfection, is itself considered 
as an amiable quality, and certainly heightens every other 
that is so. I know it is in everybody’s mouth, that we 
ought to love perfection. This is to mea sufficient proof, 
that it is not the proper object of love. Who ever said we 
ought to love a fine woman, or even any of these beautiful 
animals which please us? Here to be affected, there is no 
need of the concurrence of our will. 


SEGHION XxX 


HOW FAR THE IDEA OF BEAUTY MAY BE APPLIED TO THE 
QUALITIES OF THE MIND 


Nor is this remark in general less applicable to the qual- 
ities of the mind. Those virtues which cause admiration, 
and are of the sublimer kind, produce terror rather than 
love; such as fortitude, justice, wisdom, and the like. Never 
was any man amiable by force of these qualities. Those 
which engage our hearts, which impress us with a sense of 
loveliness, are the softer virtues ; easiness of temper, compas- 
sion, kindness, and liberality ; though certainly those latter 
are of less immediate and momentous concern to society, 
and of less dignity. But it is for that reason that they are 
so amiable. The great virtues turn principally on dangers, 
punishments, and troubles, and are exercised, rather in pre- 
venting the worst mischiefs, than in dispensing favours ; and 
are therefore not lovely, though highly venerable. The 
subordinate turn on reliefs, gratifications, and indulgences ; 
and are therefore more lovely, though inferior in dignity, 
Those persons who creep into the hearts of most people, 
who are chosen as the companions of their softer hours, and 
their reliefs from care and anxiety, are never persons of shin- 

19 


290 BURKE 


ing qualities or strong virtues. It is rather the soft green of 
the soul on which we rest our eyes, that are fatigued with 
beholding more glaring objects. It is worth observing how 
we feel ourselves affected in reading the characters of Czsar 
and Cato, as they are so finely drawn and contrasted in 
Sallust. In one the ignoscendo largiundo ; in the other, nil 
largiundo. In one, the miseris perfugium; in the other, 
malis perniciem. In the latter we have much to admire, 
much to reverence, and perhaps something to fear; we 
respect him, but we respect him at a distance. The former 
makes us familiar with him; we love him, and he leads us 
whither he pleases. To draw things closer to our first and 
most natural feelings, I will add a remark made upon read- 
ing this section by an ingenious friend. The authority 
of a father, so useful to our well-being, and so justly vener- 
able upon all accounts, hinders us from having that entire 
love for him that we have for our mothers, where the paren- 
tal authority is almost melted down into the mother’s fond- 
ness and indulgence. But we generally have a great love 
for our grandfathers, in whom this authority is removed a 
degree from us, and where the weakness of age mellows it 
into something of a feminine partiality. 


SECTION XI 


HOW FAR THE IDEA OF BEAUTY MAY BE APPLIED TO 
VIRTUE 


FROM what has been said in the foregoing section, we may 
easily see how far the application of beauty to virtue may be 
made with propriety. The general application of this quality 
to virtue has a strong tendency to confound our ideas of 
things, and it has given rise to an infinite deal of whimsical 
theory ; as the affixing the name of beauty to proportion, 
congruity, and perfection, as well as to qualities of things yet 
more remote from our natural ideas of it, and from one an- 
other, has tended to confound our ideas of beauty, and left 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 291 


us no standard or rule to judge by, that was not even more 
uncertain and fallacious than our own fancies. This loose 
and inaccurate manner of speaking has therefore misled us 
both in the theory of taste and of morals ; and induced us 
to remove the science of our duties from their proper basis 
(our reason, our relations, and our necessities), to rest it upon 
foundations altogether visionary and unsubstantial. 


SECTIONwXIT 
THE REAL CAUSE OF BEAUTY 


HAVING endeavoured to show what beauty is not, it re- 
mains that we should examine, at least with equal attention, 
in what it really consists. Beauty isa thing much too af- 
fecting not to depend upon some positive qualities, And 
since it is no creature of our reason, since it strikes us with- 
out any reference to use, and even where no use at all can 
be discerned, since the order and method of nature is gen- 
erally very different from our measures and proportions, we 
must conclude that beauty is, for the greater part, some 
quality in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind 
by the intervention of the senses. We ought, therefore, to 
consider attentively in what manner those sensible qualities 
are disposed, in such things as by experience we find beauti- 
ful, or which excite in us the passion of love, or some cor- 
respondent affection. 


SECTION XIII 
BEAUTIFUL OBJECTS SMALL 


THE most obvious point that presents itself to us in ex- 
amining any object is its extent or quantity. And what de- 
gree of extent prevails in bodies that are held beautiful, may 
be gathered from the usual manner of expression concerning 


202 BURKE 


it. Iam told that, in most languages, the objects of love 
are spoken of under diminutive epithets. It is so in all the 
languages of which I have any knowledge. In Greek the 
cov and other diminutive terms are almost always the terms 
of affection and tenderness. These diminutives were com- 
monly added by the Greeks to the names of persons with 
whom they conversed on terms of friendship and familiarity. 
Though the Romans were a people of less quick and del- 
icate feelings, yet they naturally slid into the lessening ter- 
mination upon the same occasions. Anciently, in the Eng- 
lish language, the diminishing ling was added to the names of 
persons and things that were the objects of love. Some we 
retain still, as darling (or little dear), and a few others. But 
to this day, in ordinary conversation, it is usual to add the 
endearing name of little to everything we love ; the French 
and Italians make use of these affectionate diminutives even 
more than we. In the animal creation, out of our own spe- 
cies, it is the small we are inclined to be fond of ; little birds, 
and some of the smaller kinds of beasts. A great beautiful 
thing is a manner of expression scarcely ever used ; but that 
of a great ugly thing is very common. There is a wide dif- 
ference between admiration and love. The sublime, which 
is the cause of the former, always dwells on great objects, 
and terrible ; the latter on small ones, and pleasing; we 
submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us ; 
in one case we are forced, in the other we are flattered, into 
compliance. In short, the ideas of the sublime and the 
beautiful stand on foundations so different, that it is hard, I 
had almost said impossible, to think of reconciling them in 
the same subject, without considerably lessening the effect 
of the one or the other upon the passions. So that, attend- 
ing to their quantity, beautiful objects are comparatively 
small. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 293 


SECTION XIV 
SMOOTHNESS 


THE next property constantly observable in such objects 
is smoothness ;/ a quality so essential to beauty, that I do 
not now recollect anything beautiful that isnot smooth. In 
trees and flowers, smooth leaves are beautiful; smooth 
slopes of earth in gardens ; smooth streams in the landscape; 
smooth coats of birds and beasts in animal beauties; in fine 
women, smooth skins; and in several sorts of ornamental 
furniture, smooth and polished surfaces. A very consider- 
able part of the effect of beauty is owing to this quality ; 
indeed the most considerable. For, take any beautiful 
object, and give it a broken and rugged surface; and, how- 
ever well formed it may be in other respects, it pleases no 
longer. Whereas, let it want ever so many of the other con- 
stituents, if it wants not this, it becomes more pleasing than 
almost all the others without it. This seems to me so evi- 
dent, that Iam a good deal surprised that none who have 
handled the subject have made any mention of the quality 
of smoothness in the enumeration of those that go to the 
forming of beauty. For, indeed, any ruggedness, any sud- 
den projection, any sharp angle, is in the highest degree 
contrary to that idea. 

NOTE 


1. Part IV. sect. 20. 


SECTION XV 
GRADUAL VARIATION 


BuT as perfectly beautiful bodies are not composed of 
angular parts, so their parts never continue long in the same 
right line.) They vary their direction every moment, and 
they change under the eye by a deviation continually carry- 
ing on, but for whose beginning or end you will find it 


204 BURKE 


difficult to ascertain a point. The view of a beautiful bird 
will illustrate this observation. Here we see the head in- 
creasing insensibly to the middle, from whence it lessens 
gradually until it mixes with the neck; the neck loses it- 
self in a larger swell, which continues to the middle of the 
body, when the whole decreases again to the tail; the tail 
takes a new direction, but it soon varies its new course, 
it blends again with the other parts, and the line is per- 
petually changing, above, below, upon every side. In this 
description I have before me the idea of a dove; it agrees 
very well with most of the conditions of beauty. It is 
smooth and downy; its parts are (to use that expression) 
melted into one another; you are presented with no sudden 
protuberance through the whole, and yet the whole is con- 
tinually changing. Observe that part of a beautiful woman 
where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and 
breasts ; the smoothness, the softness, the easy and insen- 
sible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the 
smallest space the same; the deceitful maze through which 
the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to 
fix, or whither it is carried. Is not this a demonstration of 
that change of surface, continual, and yet hardly perceptible 
at any point, which forms one of the great constituents of 
beauty? It gives meno small pleasure to find that I can 
strengthen my theory in this point by the opinion of the 
very ingenious Mr. Hogarth, whose idea of the line of beauty 
I take in general to be extremely just. But the idea of varia- 
tion, without attending so accurately to the manner of the 
variation, has led him to consider angular figures as beauti- 
ful; these figures, it is true, vary greatly, yet they vary ina 
sudden and broken manner, and I do not find any natural 
object which is angular, and at the same time beautiful. In- 
deed, few natural objects are entirely angular. But I think 
those which approach the most nearly to it are the ugliest. 
I must add, too, that so far as I could observe of nature, 
though the varied line is that alone in which complete 
beauty is found, yet there is no particular line which is 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 2905 


always found in the most completely beautiful, and which is 
therefore beautiful in preference to all other lines, At least 


I never could observe it. 
NOTE 
I. Part IV. sect. 23 


SECTION XVI 
DELICACY 


AN air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to 
beauty. An appearance of delicacy, and even of fragility, 
is almost essential to it. Whoever examines the vegetable 
or animal creation will find this observation to be founded 
in nature. It is not the oak, the ash, or the elm, or any of 
the robust trees of the forest which we consider as beautiful ; 
they are awful and majestic, they inspire a sort of reverence. 
It is the delicate myrtle, it is the orange, it is the almond, it 
is the jasmine, it is the vine which we look on as vegetable 
beauties. It is the flowery species, so remarkable for its 
weakness and momentary duration, that gives us the live- 
liest idea of beauty and elegance. Among animals, the 
greyhound is more beautiful than the mastiff, and the deli- 
cacy of a jennet, a barb, or an Arabian horse, is much more 
amiable than the strength and stability of some horses of 
war or carriage. I need here say little of the fair sex, where 
I believe the point will be easily allowed me. The beauty 
of women is considerably owing to their weakness or delicacy, 
and is even enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind 
analogous to it. I would not here be understood to say, 
that weakness betraying very bad health has any share in 
beauty; but the ill effect of this is not because it is weak- 
ness, but because the ill state of health, which produces such 
weakness, alters the other conditions of beauty ; the partsin 
such a case collapse, the bright colour, the lumen purpureum 
juventz is gone, and the fine variation is lost in wrinkles, 
sudden breaks, and right lines. 


296 BURKE 


SECTION XVII 
BEAUTY IN COLOUR 


As to the colours usually found in beautiful bodies, it may 
be somewhat difficult to ascertain them, because, in the 
several parts of nature, there is an infinite variety. How- 
ever, even in this variety, we may mark out something on 
which to settle. First, the colours of beautiful bodies must 
not be dusky or muddy, but clean and fair. Secondly, they 
must not be of the strongest kind. Those which seem most 
appropriated to beauty, are the milder of every sort; light 
greens; soft blues; weak whites; pink reds; and violets. 
Thirdly, if the colours be strong and vivid, they are always 
diversified, and the object is never of one strong colour ; there 
are almost always such a number of them (as in variegated 
flowers) that the strength and glare of each is considerably 
abated. In afine complexion there is not only some variety 
in the colouring, but the colours : neither the red nor the white 
are strong and glaring. Besides, they are mixed in sucha 
manner, and with such gradations, that it is impossible to fix 
the bounds. Onthe same principle it is that the dubious 
colour in the necks and tails of peacocks, and about the 
heads of drakes, is so very agreeable. In reality, the beauty 
both of shape and colouring are as nearly related as we can 
well suppose it possible for things of such different natures 
to be. 


—_———— 


EC CO Nad 


RECAPITULATION 


On the whole, the qualities of beauty, as they are merely 
sensible qualities, are the following: First, to be compari- 
tively small. Secondly, to be smooth. Thirdly, to have a 
variety in the direction of the parts; but, fourthly, to have 
those parts not angular, but melted, as it were, into each 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 297 


other. Fifthly, to be of a delicate frame, without any re- 
markable appearance of strength. Sixthly, to have its colours 
clear and bright, but not very strong and glaring. Seventhly, 
or if it should have any glaring colour, to have it diversified 
with others. These are, I believe, the properties on which 
beauty depends; properties that operate by nature, and are 
less liable to be altered by caprice, or confounded by a di- 
versity of tastes, than any other. 


SECTION XIX 
THE PHYSIOGNOMY 


THE physiognomy has a considerable share in beauty, 
especially in that of our own species. The manners give a 
certain determination to the countenance; which, being ob- 
served to correspond pretty regularly with them, is capable 
of joining the effect of certain agreeable qualities of the mind 
to those of the body. So that to form a finished human 
beauty, and to give it its full influence, the face must be ex- 
pressive of such gentle and amiable qualities, as correspond 
with the softness, smoothness, and delicacy of the outward 
form. 


oo 


SECTION XX 
THE EYE 


I HAVE hitherto purposely omitted to speak of the eye, 
which has so great a share in the beauty of the animal crea- 
tion, as it did not fall so easily under the foregoing heads, 
though in fact it is reducible to the same principles, I think, 
then, that the beauty of the eye consists, first, in its clear- 
ness; what coloured eye shall please most, depends a good 
deal on particular fancies; but none are pleased with 
an eye whose water (to use that term) is dull and muddy.! 


298 BURKE 


We are pleased with the eye in this view, on the principle upon 
which we like diamonds, clear water, glass, and such like trans- 
parent substances. Secondly, the motion of the eye contrib- 
utes to its beauty, by continually shifting its direction; but a 
slow and languid motion is more beautiful than a brisk one; 
the latter is enlivening; the former lovely. Thirdly, with 
regard to the union of the eye with the neighbouring parts, 
it is to hold the same rule that is given of other beautiful 
ones; it is not to make a strong deviation from the line of 
the neighbouring parts; nor to verge into any exact geomet- 
rical figure. Besides all this, the eye affects, as it is ex- 
pressive of some qualities of the mind, and its principal 
power generally arises from this; so that what we have just 
said of the physiognomy is applicable here. 


NOTE 


I. Part IV. sect. 25. 


SECTION xXxI 
UGLINESS 


IT may perhaps appear like a sort of repetition of what we 
have before said, to insist here upon the nature of ugliness ; 
as I imagine it to be in all respects the opposite to those 
qualities which we have laid down for the constituents of 
beauty. But though ugliness be the opposite to beauty, it 
is not the opposite to proportion and fitness. For it is pos- 
sible that a thing may be very ugly with any proportions, 
and with a perfect fitness to any uses. Ugliness I imagine 
likewise to be consistent enough with an idea of the sub- 
lime. But I would by no means insinuate that ugliness of 
itself is a sublime idea, unless united with such qualities as 
excite a strong terror. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 299 


SECTION XXII 
GRACE 


GRACEFULNESS is an idea not very different from beauty ; 
it consists in much thesame things. Gracefulness is an idea 
belonging to posture and motion. In both these, to be 
graceful, it is requisite that there be no appearance of diffi- 
culty ; there is required a small inflection of the body ; and 
a composure of the parts in such a manner, as not to incum- 
ber each other, not to appear divided by sharp and sudden 
angles. In this case, this roundness, this delicacy of attitude 
and motion, it is that all the magic of grace consists, and 
what is called its je ne sgai quoi ; as will be obvious to any 
observer, who considers attentively the Venus de Medicis, 
the Antinous or any statue generally allowed to be graceful 
in a high degree. 


LOIN AO LL 
ELEGANCE AND SPECIOUSNESS 


WHEN any body is composed of parts smooth and pol- 
ished, without pressing upon each other, without showing 
any ruggedness or confusion, and at the same time affecting 
some regular shape, I call it elegant. It is closely allied to 
the beautiful, differing from it only in this regularity ; which, 
however, as it makes a very material difference in the 
affection produced, may very well constitute another species. 
Under this head I rank those delicate and regular works of 
art, that imitate no determinate object in nature, as elegant 
buildings, and pieces of furniture. When any object par- 
takes of the above-mentioned qualities, or of those of beauti- 
ful bodies, and is withal of great dimensions, it is full as 
remote from the idea of mere beauty; I call it fine or 
specious. 


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SECTION XXIV 
THE BEAUTIFUL IN FEELING 


THE foregoing description of beauty, so far as it is taken 
in by the eye, may be greatly illustrated by describing the 
nature of objects, which produce asimilar effect through the 
touch. This I call the beautiful in feeling. It corresponds 
wonderfully with what causes the same species of pleasure 
to the sight. There is a chain in all our sensations; they 
are all but different sorts of feelings calculated to be affected 
by various sorts of objects, but all to be affected after the 
same manner. All bodies that are pleasant to the touch, are 
so by the slightness of the resistance they make. Resistance 
is either to motion along the surface, or to the pressure of 
the parts on one another: if the former be slight, we call the 
body smooth; if the latter, soft. The chief pleasure we re- 
ceive by feeling, is in the one or the other of these qualities ; 
and if there be a combination of both, our pleasure is greatly 
increased. This is so plain, that it is rather more fit to 
illustrate other things, than to be illustrated itself by an 
example. The next source of pleasure in this sense, as in 
every other, is the continually presenting somewhat new; 
and we find that bodies which continually vary their surface, 
are much the most pleasant or beautiful to the feeling, as 
any one that pleases may experience. The third property 
in such objects is, that though the surface continually varies 
its direction, it never varies it suddenly. The application 
of anything sudden, even though the impression itself have 
little or nothing of violence, is disagreeable. The quick 
application of a finger a little warmer or colder than usual, 
without notice, makes us start; a slight tap on the shoulder, 
not expected, has the same effect. Hence it is that angular 
bodies, bodies that suddenly vary the direction of the outline, 
affofd so little pleasure to the feeling. Every such change is 
a sort of climbing or falling in miniature; so that squares, 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 301 


triangles, and other angular figures are neither beautiful to the 
sight nor feeling. Whoever compares his state of mind, on 
feeling soft, smooth, variated, unangular bodies, with that in 
which he finds himself, on the view of a beautiful object, will 
perceive a very striking analogy in the effects of both; and 
which may go a good way towards discovering their common 
cause. Feeling and sight, in this respect, differ in but a few 
points. The touch takes in the pleasure of softness, which 
is not primarily an object of sight; the sight, on the other 
hand, comprehends colour, which can hardly be made per- 
ceptible to the touch: the touch, again, has the advantage 
in a new idea of pleasure resulting from a moderate degree 
of warmth; but the eye triumphs in the infinite extent and 
multiplicity of its objects. But there is such a similitude in 
the pleasures of these senses, that I am apt to fancy, if it 
were possible that one might discern colour by feeling (as it 
is said some blind men have done) that the same colours, 
and the same disposition of colouring, which are found 
beautiful to the sight, would be found likewise most grate- 
ful to the touch. But, setting aside conjectures, let us pass 
to the other sense; of hearing. 


SECTION XXV 
THE BEAUTIFUL IN SOUNDS 


IN this sense we find an equal aptitude to be affected in a 
soft and delicate manner; and how far sweet or beautiful 
sounds agree with our descriptions of beauty in other senses, 
the experience of every one must decide. Milton has de 
scribed this species of music in one of his juvenile poems.} 
I need not say that Milton was perfectly well versed in that 
art; and that no man had a finer ear, with a happier manner 
of expressing the affections of one sense by metaphors taken 
from another. The description is as follows :— 


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““ And ever against eating cares, 
Lap me in soft Lydian airs ; 
In notes with many a winding bout 
Of linked sweetness long drawn out; 
With wanton heed, and giddy cunning, 
The melting voice through mazes running; 
Untwisting all the chains that tie 
The hidden soul of harmony.” 


Let us parallel this with the softness, the winding surface, 
the unbroken continuance, the easy gradation of the beauti- 
ful in other things; and all the diversities of the several 
senses, with all their several affections, will rather help to 
throw lights from one another to finish one clear, consistent 
idea of the whole, than to obscure it by their intricacy and 
variety. 

To the above-mentioned description I shall add one or 
two remarks. The first is: that the beautiful in music will 
not bear that loudness and strength of sounds, which may be 
used to raise other passions; nor notes which are shrill, or 
harsh, or deep; it agrees best with such as are clear, even, 
smooth, and weak. The second is; that great variety, and 
quick transitions from one measure or tone to another, are 
contrary to the genius of the beautiful in music. Such? 
transitions often excite mirth, or other sudden or tumultu- 
ous passions; but not that sinking, that melting, that lan- 
guor, which is the characteristical effect of the beautiful as it 
regardsevery sense. The passion excited by beauty is in fact 
nearer to a species of melancholy, than to jollity and mirth. 
I do not here mean to confine music to any one species of 
notes, or tones, neither is it an art in which I can say I have 
any great skill. My sole design in this remark is to settle a 
consistent idea of beauty. The infinite variety of the affec- 
tions of the soul will suggest to a good head, and skilful ear, 
a variety of such sounds as are fitted to raise them. It can 
be no prejudice to this, to clear and distinguish some few 
particulars that belong to the same class, and are consistent 
with each other, from the immense crowd of different and 
sometimes contradictory ideas, that rank vulgarly under the 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 303 


standard of beauty. And of these it is my intention to mark 
such only of the leading points as show the conformity of 
the sense of hearing with all the other senses, in the article 
of their pleasures. 

NOTES 


1. L’ Allegro. 
2. “I ne’er am merry, when I hear sweet music.” 
SHAKESPEARE. 


SECTION XXVI 
TASTE AND SMELL 


THIS general agreement of the senses is yet more evident 
on minutely considering those of taste and smell. We met- 
aphorically apply the idea of sweetness to sights and sounds ; 
but as the qualities of bodies by which they are fitted to ex- 
cite either pleasure or pain in these senses are not so obvious 
as they are in the others, we shall refer an explanation of 
their analogy, which is a very close one, to that part wherein 
we come to consider the common efficient cause of beauty, 
as it regards all the senses. I do not think anything better 
fitted to establish a clear and settled idea of visual beauty 
than this way of examining the similar pleasures of other 
senses ; for one part is sometimes clear in one of the senses 
that is more obscure in another; and where there is a clear 
concurrence of all, we may with more certainty speak of any 
one of them. By this means, they bear witness to each 
other; nature is, as it were, scrutinized ; and we report noth- 
ing of her but what we receive from her own information. 


SECTION XXVII 
THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL COMPARED 


ON closing this general view of beauty, it naturally occurs 
that we should compare it with the sublime; and in this 
comparison there appears a remarkable contrast. For 


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sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones 
comparatively small ; beauty should be smooth and polished ; 
the great, rugged and negligent: beauty should shun the 
right line, yet deviate from it insensibly ; the great in many 
cases loves the right line; and when it deviates, it often 
makes a strong deviation: beauty should not be obscure; the 
great ought to be dark and gloomy: beauty should be light 
and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive. 
They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being 
founded on pain, the other on pleasure ; and, however they 
may vary afterwards from the direct nature of their causes, 
yet these causes keep up an eternal distinction between 
them, a distinction never to be forgotten by any whose busi- 
ness it is to affect the passions. In the infinite variety of 
natural combinations, we must expect to find the qualities of 
things the most remote imaginable from each other united 
in the same object. We must expect also to find combina- 
tions of the same kind in the works of art. But when we 
consider the power of an object upon our passions, we must 
know that when anything is intended to affect the mind by 
the force of some predominant property, the affection pro- 
duced is like to be the more uniform and perfect, if all the 
other properties or qualities of the object be of the same 
nature, and tending to the same design as the principal. 


“Tf black and white blend, soften, and unite 
A thousand ways, are there no black and white ?” 


If the qualities of the sublime and beautiful are sometimes 
found united, does this prove that they are the same; does 
it prove that they are any way allied; does it prove even 
that they are not opposite and contradictory? Black and 
white may soften, may blend; but they are not therefore 
the same. Nor, when they are so softened and blended 
with each other, or with different colours, is the power of black 
as black, or of white as white, so strong as when each 
stands uniform and distinguished. 


PART FOURTH 


SECTION I 


OF THE EFFICIENT CAUSE OF THE SUBLIME AND BEAU- 
TIFUL 


HEN I say, I intend to inquire into the efficient 

cause of sublimity and beauty, I would not be 
understood to say, that I can come to the ultimate cause. 
I do not pretend that I shall ever be able to explain why 
certain affections of the body produce such a distinct emotion 
of mind, and no other; or why the body is at all affected 
by the mind, or the mind by the body. A little thought 
will show thisto be impossible. But I conceive, if we 
can discover what affections of the mind produce cer- 
tain emotions of the body; and what distinct feelings 
and qualities of body shall produce certain determinate pas- 
sions in the mind, and no others, I fancy a great deal will be 
done; something not unuseful towards a distinct knowledge 
of our passions, so far at least as we have them at present 
under our consideration. This is all, I believe, we can do. 
If we could advance a step farther, difficulties would still 
remain, as we should be still equally distant from the first 
cause. When Newton first discovered the property of at- 
traction, and settled its laws, he found it served very well to 
explain several of the most remarkable phenomena in nat- 
ure; but yet, with reference to the general system of things, 
he could consider attraction but as an effect, whose cause at 
that time he did not attempt to trace. But when he after- 
wards began to account for it by a subtle elastic ether, this 
great man (if in so great a man it be not impious to discover 


anything like a blemish) seemed to have quitted his usual 
20 305 


306 BURKE 


cautious manner of philosophizing; since, perhaps, allowing 
all that has been advanced on this subject to be sufficiently 
proved, I think it leaves us with as many difficulties as it 
found us. That great chain of causes, which, linking one to 
another, even to the throne of God himself, can never be 
unravelled by any industry of ours. When we go but one 
step beyond the immediate sensible qualities of things, we 
go out of our depth. All we do after is but a faint struggle, 
that shows we are in an element which does not belong to 
us. So that when I speak of cause, and efficient cause, I 
only mean certain affections of the mind, that cause certain 
changes in the body; or certain powers and properties in 
bodies, that work a change in the mind. As, if I were to 
explain the motion of a body falling to the ground, I would 
say it was caused by gravity: and I would endeavour to show 
after what manner this power operated, without attempting 
to show why it operated in this manner: or, if I were to ex- 
plain the effects of bodies striking one another by the com- 
mon laws of percussion, I should not endeavour to explain 
how motion itself is communicated. 


SECTION: It 
ASSOCIATION 


IT is no small bar in the way of our inquiry into the cause 
of our passions, that the occasions of many of them are 
given, and that their governing motions are communicated 
at a time when we have not capacity to reflect on them; at 
a time of which all sort of memory is worn out of our minds. 
For besides such things as affect us in various manners, ac- 
cording to their natural powers, there are associations made 
at that early season, which we find it very hard afterwards to 
distinguish from natural effects. Not to mention the un- 
accountable antipathies which we find in many persons, we 
all find it impossible to remember when a steep became 
more terrible than a plain; or fire or water more terrible 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 307 


than a clod of earth; though all these are very probably 
either conclusions from experience, or arising from the pre- 
monitions of others; and some of them impressed, in all 
likelihood, pretty late. But as it must be allowed that 
many things affect us after a certain manner, not by any 
natural powers they have for that purpose, but by associa- 
tion; so it would be absurd, on the other hand, to say that 
all things affect us by association only; since some things 
must have been originally and naturally agreeable or dis- 
agreeable, from which the others derive their associated 
powers; and it would be, I fancy, to little purpose to look 
for the cause of our passions in association, until we fail of 
it in the natural properties of things. 


SECTION III 
CAUSE OF PAIN AND FEAR 


I HAVE before observed,! that whatever is qualified to 
cause terror is a foundation capable of the sublime ; to which 
I add, that not only these, but many things from which we 
can not probably apprehend any danger, have a similar effect, 
because they operate in similar manner. I observed, too,” 
that whatever produces pleasure, positive and original pleas- 
ure, is fit to have beauty engrafted onit. Therefore, to clear 
up the nature of these qualities, it may be necessary to ex- 
plain the nature of pain and pleasure on which they depend. 
A man who suffers under violent bodily pain (I suppose the 
most violent, because the effect may be the more obvious,) I 
say a man in great pain has his teeth set, his eyebrows are 
violently contracted, his forehead is wrinkled, his eyes are 
dragged inwards, and rolled with great vehemence, his hair 
stands on end, the voice is forced out in short shrieks and 
groans, andthe whole fabric totters. Fear or terror, which is 
an apprehension of pain or death, exhibits exactly the same 
effects, approaching in violence to those just mentioned, in 
proportion to the nearness of the cause, and the weakness of 


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the subject. This is not only so in the human species: but 
I have more than once observed in dogs, under an apprehen- 
sion of punishment, that they have writhed their bodies, and 
yelped, and howled, as if they had actually felt the blows. 
From hence I conclude, that pain and fear act upon the same 
parts of the body, and in the same manner, though some- 
what differing in degree: that pain and fear consist in an 
unnatural tension of the nerves; that this is sometimes 
accompanied with an unnatural strength, which sometimes 
suddenly changes into an extraordinary weakness; that these 
effects often come on alternately, and are sometimes mixed 
with each other. This is the nature of all convulsive agita- 
tions, especially in weaker subjects, which are the most liable 
to the severest impressions of pain and fear. The only dif- 
ference between pain and terror is, that things which cause 
pain operate on the mind by the intervention of the body ; 
whereas things that cause terror generally affect the bodily 
organs by the operation of the mind suggesting the danger ; 
but both agreeing, either primarily or secondarily, in produc- 
ing a tension, contraction, or violent emotion of the nerves,’ 
they agree likewise in everything else. For it appears very 
clearly to me from this, as well as from many other examples, 
that when the body is disposed, by any means whatsoever, to 
such emotions as it would acquire by the means of a certain 
passion ; it will of itself excite something very like that pas- 
sion in the mind. 
NOTES 


1. Part, I., secti 7. 

2. Part 1. sect. 10. 

3. I do not here enter into the question debated among physiologists, whether 
pain be the effect of a contraction, or a tension of the nerves. Either will 
serve my purpose; for by tension, I mean no more thana violent pulling of the 
fibres which compose any muscle or membrane, in whatever way this is done. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 309 


SECTION IV 


CONTINUED 


To this purpose Mr. Spon, in his “ Récherches d’An- 
tiquité,” gives us a curious story of the celebrated physiog- 
nomist Campanella. This man, it seems, had not only 
made very accurate observations on human faces, but was 
very expert in mimicking such as were any way remark- 
able. When he had a mind to penetrate into the inclina- 
tions of those he had to deal with, he composed his face, 
his gesture, and his whole body, as nearly as he could 
into the exact similitude of the person he intended to 
examine; and then carefully observed what turn of mind 
he seemed to acquire by this change. So that, says my 
author, he was able to enter into the dispositions and 
thoughts of people as effectually as if he had been changed 
into the very men. I have often observed, that on 
mimicking the looks and gestures of angry, or placid, or 
frighted, or daring men, I have involuntarily found my mind 
turned to that passion, whose appearance I endeavoured to 
imitate; nay, I am convinced it is hard to avoid it, though one 
strove to separate the passion from its correspondent gestures. 
Our minds and bodiesare so closely and intimately connected, 
that one is incapable of pain or pleasure without the other. 
Campanella, of whom we have been speaking, could so ab- 
stract his attention from any sufferings of his body, that he 
was able to endure the rack itself without much pain; and in 
lesser pains everybody must have observed that, when we can 
employ our attention on anything else, the pain has been for 
atime suspended: on the other hand, if by any means the 
body is indisposed to perform such gestures, or to be stimu- 
lated into such emotions as any passion usually produces in 
it, that passion itself never can arise, though its cause should 
be never so strongly in action; though it should be merely 
mental, and immediately affecting none of the senses, As 


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an opiate, or spirituous liquors, shall suspend the operation 
of grief, or fear, or anger, in spite of all our efforts to the 
contrary ; andthis by inducing in the body a disposition con- 
tary to that which it receives from these passions. 


SECTION V 
HOW THE SUBLIME IS PRODUCED 


HAVING considered terror as producing an unnatural ten- 
sion and certain violent emotions of the nerves; it easily 
follows, from what we have just said, that whatever is fitted 
to produce sucha tension must be productive of a passion 
similar to terror,! and consequently must be a source of the 
sublime, though it should have no idea of danger connected 
with it. So that little remains towards showing the cause 
of the sublime, but to show that the instances we have given 
of it in the second part relate to such things, as are fitted by 
nature to produce this sort of tension, either by the primary 
operation of the mind or the body. With regard to such 
things as affect by the associated idea of danger, there can 
be no doubt but that they produce terror, and act by some 
modification of that passion; and that terror, when suffi- 
ciently violent, raises the emotions of the body just men- 
tioned, can as little be doubted. But if the sublime is built 
on terror or some passion like it, which has pain for its 
object, it is previously proper to inquire how any species of 
delight can be derived from a cause so apparently contrary 
to it. I say delight, because, as I have often remarked, it is 
very evidently different in its cause, and in its own nature, 
from actual and positive pleasure. 

NOTE 
1. Part II. sect. 2: 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 311 


SECTION VI 
HOW PAIN CAN BE A CAUSE OF DELIGHT 


PROVIDENCE has so ordered it, that a state of rest and 
inaction, however it may flatter our indolence, should be 
productive of many inconveniences; that it should gener- 
ate such disorders, as may force us to have recourse to 
some labour, as a thing absolutely requisite to make us pass 
our lives with tolerable satisfaction; for the nature of rest 
is to suffer all the parts of our bodies to fall into a relaxation, 
that not only disables the members from performing their 
functions, but takes away the vigorous tone of fibre which 
is requisite for carrying on the natural and necessary secre- 
tions. At the same time, that in this languid inactive state, 
the nerves are more liable to the most horrid convulsions, 
than when they are sufficiently braced and strengthened. 
Melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder, is the 
consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this 
relaxed state of body. The best remedy for all these evils is 
exercise or labour; and labour isa surmounting of difficulties, 
an exertion of the contracting power of the muscles; and as 
such resembles pain, which consists in tension or contraction, 
in everything but degree. Labour is not only requisite to 
preserve the coarser organs, in a state fit for their functions ; 
but it is equally necessary to these finer and more delicate 
organs, on which, and by which, the imagination and per- 
haps the other mental powers act. Since it is probable that 
not only the inferior parts of the soul, as the passions are 
called, but the understanding itself makes use of some fine 
corporeal instruments in its operation; though what they 
are, and where they are, may be somewhat hard to settle: 
but that it does make use of such, appears from hence; that 
a long exercise of the mental powers induces a remarkable 
lassitude of the whole body; and on the other hand, that 
great bodily labour, or pain, weakens and sometimes actually 
destroys the mental faculties. Now, as a due exercise is 


312 BURKE 


essential to the coarse muscular parts of the constitution, and 
that without this rousing they would become languid and 
diseased, the very same rule holds with regard to those finer 
parts we have mentioned; to have them in proper order, 
they must be shaken and worked to a proper degree, 


SECTION VII 
EXERCISE NECESSARY FOR THE FINER ORGANS 


AS common labour, which is a mode of pain, is the exer- 
cise of the grosser, a mode of terror is the exercise of the 
finer parts of the system ; and if a certain mode of pain be 
of such a nature as to act upon the eye or the ear, as they 
are the most delicate organs, the affection approaches more 
nearly to that which has a mental cause. In all these cases, 
if the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually 
noxious ; if the pain is not carried to violence, and the terror 
is not conversant about the present destruction of the person, 
as these emotions clear the parts, whether fine or gross, of a 
dangerous and troublesome incumbrance, they are capable 
of producing delight ; not pleasure, but a sort of delightful 
horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror; which, as it 
belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all the 
passions. Its object is the sublime! Its highest degree I 
call astonishment ; the subordinate degrees are awe, reverence, 
and respect, which, by the very etymology of the words, 
show from what source they are derived, and how they stand 
distinguished from positive pleasure. 

NOTE 
i.) Parti lsect..4, 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 313 


SECTION VIII 


WHY THINGS NOT DANGEROUS SOMETIMES PRODUCE A 
PASSION LIKE TERROR 


A MODE of terror or pain is always the cause of the sub- 
lime! For terror or associated danger, the foregoing explica- 
tion is, I believe, sufficient. It will require something more 
trouble to show, that such examples as I have given of the 
sublime in the second part are capable of producing a mode 
of pain, and of being thus allied to terror, and to be ac- 
counted for on the same principles. And first of such 
objects as are great in their dimensions. I speak of visual 


objects. 
NOTE 


q.)Part I, sect..7./ » Part-II. sect./2. 


SECTION: EX 


WHY VISUAL OBJECTS OF GREAT DIMENSIONS ARE 
SUBLIME 


VISION is performed by having a picture, formed by the 
rays of light which are reflected from the object, painted in 
one piece, instantaneously, on the retina, or last nervous part 
ofthe eye. Or, according to others, there is but one point of 
any object painted on the eye in such a manner as to be per- 
ceived at once ; but by moving the eye, we gather up, with 
ereat celerity, the several parts of the object, so as to form 
one uniform piece. If the former opinion be allowed, it will 
be considered,! that though all the light reflected from a large 
body should strike the eye in one instant ; yet we must 
suppose that the body itself is formed of a vast number of 
distinct points, every one of which, or the ray from every 
one, makes an impression on the retina. So that, though 
the image of one point should cause but a small tension of 
this membrane, another, and another, and another stroke, 


314 BURKE 


must in their progress cause a very great one, until it arrives 
at last to the highest degree ; and the whole capacity of the 
eye, vibrating in all its parts, must approach near to the 
nature of what causes pain, and consequently must produce 
an idea of the sublime. Again, if we take it, that one point 
only of an object is distinguishable at once ; the matter will 
amount nearly to the same thing, or rather it will make the 
origin of the sublime from greatness of dimension yet clearer. 
For if but one point is observed at once, the eye must 
traverse the vast space of such bodies with great quickness, 
and consequently the fine nerves and muscles destined to 
the motion of that part must be very much strained ; and 
their great sensibility must make them highly affected by 
this straining. Besides, it signifies just nothing to the effect 
produced, whether a body has its parts connected and makes 
its impression at once ; or, making but one impression of a 
point at a time, it causes a succession of the same or others 
so quickly as to make them seem united ; as is evident from 
the common effect of whirling about a lighted torch or piece 
of wood: which, if done with celerity, seems a circle of fire. 
NOTE 
1. Part II. sect. 7. 


mit DLO NX 
UNITY, WHY REQUISITE TO VASTNESS 


IT may be objected to this theory, that the eye generally 
receives an equal number of rays at all times, and that there- 
fore a great object can not affect it by the number of rays, 
more than that variety of objects which the eye must always 
discern whilst it remains open. But to this I answer, that 
admitting an equal number of rays, or an equal quantity 
of luminous particles to strike the eye at all times, yet if 
these rays frequently vary their nature, now to blue, now to 
red, and so on, or their manner of termination, as to a num- 
ber of petty squares, triangles, or the like, at every change, 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 315 


whether of colour or shape, the organ has a sort of relaxation 
or rest; but this relaxation and labour so often interrupted, 
is by no means productive of ease; neither has it the effect 
of vigorous and uniform labour. Whoever has remarked the 
different effects of some strong exercise, and some little pid- 
dling action, will understand why a teasing, fretful employ- 
ment, which at once wearies and weakens the body, should 
have nothing great; these sorts of impulses, which are 
rather teasing than painful, by continually and suddenly 
altering their tenor and direction, prevent that full tension, 
that species of uniform labour, which is allied to strong pain, 
and causes the sublime. The sum total of things of various 
kinds, though it should equal the number of the uniform 
parts composing some one entire object, is not equal in its 
effect upon the organs of our bodies. Besides the one 
already assigned, there is another very strong reason for the 
difference. The mind in reality hardly ever can attend dili- 
gently to more than one thing ata time; if this thing be 
little, the effect is little, and a number of other little objects 
can not engage the attention; the mind is bounded by the 
bounds of the object ; and what is not attended to, and what 
does not exist, are much the same inthe effect ; but the eye 
or the mind (for in this case there is no difference), in great, 
uniform objects, does not readily arrive at their bounds; it 
has no rest, whilst it contemplates them; the image is much 
the same everywhere. So that everything great by its 
quantity must necessarily be one, simple and entire. 


SECTION XI 
THE ARTIFICIAL INFINITE 


WE have observed that a species of greatness arises from 
the artificial infinite ; and that this infinite consists in an uni- 
form succession of great parts: we observed too, that the 
same uniform succession had a like power in sounds. But 
because the effects of many things are clearer in one of the 


316 BURKE 


senses than in another, and that all the senses bear analogy 
to and illustrate one another, I shall begin with this power in 
sounds, as the cause of the sublimity from succession is 
rather more obvious in the sense of hearing, And I shall 
here, once for all observe, that an investigation of the 
natural and mechanical causes of our passions, besides the 
curiosity of the subject, gives, if they are discovered, a 
double strength and lustre to any rules we deliver on such 
matters. Whenthe ear receives any simple sound, it is 
struck by a single pulse of the air which makes the ear-drum 
and the other membranous parts vibrate according to the 
nature and species of the stroke. If the stroke be strong, 
the organ of hearing suffers a considerable degree of tension. 
If the stroke be repeated pretty soon after, the repetition 
causes an expectation of another stroke. And it must be 
observed, that expectation itself causes a tension. This is 
apparent in many animals, who, when they prepare for hear- 
ing any sound, rouse themselves, and prick up their ears; so 
that here the effect of the sounds is considerably augmented 
by anew auxiliary, the expectation. But though aftera 
number of strokes, we expect still more, not being able to 
ascertain the exact time of their arrival, when they arrive, 
they produce a sort of surprise, which increases this tension 
yet further. For I have observed, that when at any time I 
have waited very earnestly for some sound, that returned at 
intervals, (as the successive firing of cannon,) though I fully 
expected the return of the sound, when it came it always 
made me start a little; the ear-drum suffered a convulsion, 
and the whole body consented with it. The tension of the 
part thus increasing at every blow, by the united forces of 
the stroke itself, the expectation and the surprise, it is 
worked up to such a pitch as to be capable of the sublime ; 
it is brought just to the verge of pain. Even when the 
cause has ceased, the organs of hearing being often succes- 
sively struck in a similar manner, continue to vibrate in that 
manner for some time longer; this is an additional help to 
the greatness of the effect. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 317 


SECTION XII 
THE VIBRATIONS MUST BE SIMILAR 


But if the vibration be not similar at every impression, it 
can never be carried beyond the number of actual impres- 
sions; for, move any body as a pendulum, in one way, and it 
will continue to oscillate in an arch of the same circle, until 
the known causes make it rest ; but if, after first putting it 
in motion in one direction, you push it into another, it can 
never reassume the first direction; because it can never 
move itself, and consequently it can have but the effect of 
that last motion; whereas, if in the same direction you act 
upon it several times, it will describe a greater arch, and 
move a longer time. 


SECTION XIII 


THE EFFECTS OF SUCCESSION IN VISUAL OBJECTS 
EXPLAINED 


IF we can comprehend clearly how things operate upon 
one of our senses, there can be very little difficulty in con- 
ceiving in what manner they affect the rest. Tosay a great 
deal therefore upon the corresponding affections of every 
sense, would tend rather to fatigue us by an useless repeti- 
tion, than to throw any new light upon the subject by that 
ample and diffuse manner of treating it; but as in this dis- 
course we chiefly attach ourselves to the sublime, as it affects 
the eye, we shall consider particularly why a successive dis- 
position of uniform parts in the same right line should be 
sublime,! and upon what principle this disposition is enabled 
to make a comparatively small quantity of matter produce a 
grander effect, than a much larger quantity disposed in an- 
other manner. To avoid the perplexity of general notions; 
let us set before our eyes a colonnade of uniform pillars 
planted in a right line; let us take our stand in such a man- 


318 BURKE 


ner, that the eye may shoot along this colonnade, for it has 
its best effect in this view. In our present situation it is 
plain, that the rays from the first round pillar will cause in 
the eye a vibration of that species; an image of the pillar 
itself. The pillar immediately succeeding increases it; that 
which follows renews and enforces the impression, each in its 
order as it succeeds, repeats impulse after impulse, and stroke 
after stroke, until the eye, long exercised in one particular 
way,can not lose that object immediately, and, being violently 
roused by this continued agitation, it presents the mind with 
a grand or sublime conception. But instead of viewing a 
rank of uniform pillars, let us suppose that they succeed 
each other, a round anda square one alternately. In this 
case the vibration caused by the first round pillar perishes as 
soon as it is formed; and one of quite another sort (the 
square) directly occupies its place ; which however it resigns 
as quickly to the round one; and thus the eye proceeds, al- 
ternately, taking up one image, and laying down another, as 
long as the building continues. From whence it is obvious 
that, at the last pillar, the impression is as far from continu- 
ing as it was at the very first; because, in fact, the sensory 
can receive no distinct impression but from the last; and it 
can never of itself resume a dissimilar impression: besides 
every variation of the object is a rest and relaxation to the 
organs of sight; and these reliefs prevent that powerful 
emotion so necessary to produce the sublime. To produce 
therefore a perfect grandeur in such things as we have been 
mentioning, there should be a perfect simplicity, an absolute 
uniformity in disposition, shape, and colouring. Upon this 
principle of succession and uniformity it may be asked, why 
a long bare wall should not be a more sublime object than 
a colonnade; since the succession is no way interrupted ; 
since the eye meets no check; since nothing more uniform 
can be conceived? A long bare wall is certainly not so 
grand an object as a colonnade of the same length and 
height. It is not altogether difficult to account for this dif- 
ference. When we look at a naked wall, for the evenness 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 319 


of the object, the eye runs along its whole space, and arrives 
quickly at its termination; the eye meets nothing which 
may interrupt its progress; but then it meets nothing which 
may detain it a proper time to produce a very great and 
lasting effect. The view of a bare wall, if it be of a great 
height and length, is undoubtedly grand; but this is only 
one idea, and not arepetition of similar ideas: it is there- 
fore great, not so much upon the principle of infinity, as 
upon that of vastness. But we are not so powerfully affected 
with any one impulse, unless it be one of a prodigious force 
indeed, as we are with a succession of similar impulses ; 
because the nerves of the sensory do not (if I may use the 
expression) acquire a habit of repeating the same feeling in 
such a manner as to continue it longer than its cause is in 
action; besides, all the effects which I have attributed to 
expectation and surprise in Section 11, can have no place in a 
bare wall. 
NoTE 


I. Part II. sect. Io. 


SieGaL LON. XTV, 
LOCKE’S OPINION CONCERNING DARKNESS CONSIDERED 


It is Mr. Locke’s opinion, that darkness is not naturally 
an idea of terror; and that, though an excessive light is 
painful to the sense, the greatest excess of darkness is no 
ways troublesome. He observes indeed in another place, 
that a nurse or an old woman having once associated the 
ideas of ghosts and goblins with that of darkness, night, ever 
after, becomes painful and horrible to the imagination. The 
authority of this great man is doubtless as great as that of 
any man can be, and it seems to stand in the way of our 
general principle.1 We have considered darkness as a cause 
of the sublime; and we have all along considered the sub. 
lime as depending on some modification of pain or terror ; 
so that if darkness be no way painful or terrible to any, who 


320 BURKE 


have not had their minds early tainted with superstitions, it 
can be no source of the sublimeto them. But, with all def- 
erence to such an authority, it seems to me, that an associ- 
ation of a more general nature, an association which takes in 
all mankind, may make darkness terrible ; for in utter dark- 
ness it is impossible to know in what degree of safety we 
stand ; we are ignorant of the objects that surround us; we 
may every moment strike against some dangerous obstruc- 
tion; we may fall down a precipice the first step we take; 
and if an enemy approach, we know not in what quarter to. 
defend ourselves; in such a case strength is no sure protec- 
tion; wisdom can only act by guess; the boldest are stag- 
gered, and he who would pray for nothing else towards his 
defence is forced to pray for light. 

Zev warep, GAAG ov pioat bm’ Hépo¢ viac ’A yao 

Tloinoov & aidpnv, dog 0 ofbadpoiory idéobaz* 

"Ep dé pdet kat dAecoov, 


As to the association of ghosts and goblins; surely it is 
more natural to think that darkness, being originally an idea 
of terror, was chosen as a fit scene for such terrible represen- 
tations, than that such representations have made darkness 
terrible. The mind of man very easily slides into an error 
of the former sort ; but it is very hard to imagine, that the 
effect of an idea so universally terrible in all times, and in all 
countries, as darkness, could possibly have been owing to a 
set of idle stories, or to any cause of a nature so trivial and 
of an operation so precarious. 

NoTE 
1. Part II. sect. 3. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 32I 


SECTION XV 
DARKNESS TERRIBLE IN ITS OWN NATURE 


PERHAPS it may appear on inquiry, that blackness and 
darkness are in some degree painful by their natural oper- 
ation, independent of any associations whatsoever. I must 
observe, that the ideas of darkness and blackness are much | 
the same; and they differ only in this, that blackness is a 
more confined idea. Mr. Cheselden has given us a very 
curious story of a boy who had been born blind, and con- 
tinued so until he was thirteen or fourteen years old; he was 
then couched for a cataract, by which operation he received 
his sight. Among many remarkable particulars that attended 
his first perceptions and judgments on visual objects, Che- 
selden tells us, that the first time the boy saw a black object 
it gave him great uneasiness ; and that some time after, upon 
accidentally seeing anegro woman, he was struck with great 
horror at the sight. The horror, in this case, can scarcely 
be supposed to arise from any association. The boy appears 
by the account to have been particularly observing and sen- 
sible for one of his age; and therefore it is probable, if the 
great uneasiness he felt at the first sight of black had 
arisen from its connection with any other disagreeable ideas 
he would have observed and mentioned it. Foran idea, 
disagreeable only by association, has the cause of its ill effect 
on the passions evident enough at the first impression; in 
ordinary cases, it is indeed frequently lost; but this is be- 
cause the original association was made very early, and the 
consequent impression repeated often. In our instance, 
there was no time for such a habit; and there is no reason 
to think that the ill effects of black on his imagination were 
more owing to its connection with any disagreeable ideas, 
than that the good effects of more cheerful colours were de- 
rived from their connection with pleasing ones. They had 


both probably their effects from their natural operation. 
21 


322 | BURKE 


SECTION XVI 
WHY DARKNESS IS TERRIBLE 


IT may be worth while to examine how darkness can oper- 
ate in such a manner as to cause pain. It is observable, that 
still as we recede from the light, nature has so contrived it, that 
the pupil is enlarged by the retiring of the iris, in proportion 
to our recess, Now, instead of declining from it but a little, 
suppose that we withdraw entirely from the light; it is rea- 
sonable to think that the contraction of the radial fibres of 
the iris is proportionably greater; and that this part may by 
great darkness come to be so contracted, as to strain the 
nerves that compose it beyond their natural tone; and by 
this means to produce a painful sensation. Such a tension 
it seems there certainly is, whilst we are involved in dark- 
ness; for in such a state, whilst the eye remains open, there is 
a continual nisus to receive light ; this is manifest from the 
flashes and luminous appearances which often seem in these 
circumstances to play before it; and which can be nothing 
but the effect of spasms, produced by its own efforts in pur- 
suit of its object: several other strong impulses will produce 
the idea of light in the eye, besides the substance of light 
itself, as we experience on many occasions. Some, who al- 
low darkness to be a cause of the sublime, would infer, from 
the dilatation of the pupil, that a relaxation may be produc- 
tive of the sublime as well asa convulsion: but they do not, 
I believe, consider, that although the circular ring of the iris 
be in some sense a sphincter, which may possibly be dilated 
by a simple relaxation, yetin one respect it differs from most 
of the other sphincters of the body, that it is furnished with 
antagonist muscles, which are the radial fibres of the iris: 
no sooner does the circular muscle begin to relax, than these 
fibres, wanting their counterpoise, are forcibly drawn back, 
and open the pupil to a considerable wideness. But though 
we were not apprised of this, I believe any one will find, if he 
opens his eyes and makes an effort to see in a dark place, that 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 323 


a very perceivable pain ensues. And I have heard some 
ladies remark, that after having worked a long time upon a 
ground of black, their eyes were so pained and weakened, 
they could hardly see. It may perhaps be objected to this 
theory of the mechanical effect of darkness, that the ill effects 
of darkness or blackness seem rather mental than corporeal: 
and I own it is true that they do so; and so do all those that 
depend on the affections of the finer parts of our system. 
The ill effects of bad weather appear often no otherwise than 
in a melancholy and dejection of spirits; though without 
doubt, in this case, the bodily organs suffer first, and the 
mind through these organs. 


SECTION XVII 


THE EFFECTS OF BLACKNESS 


BLACKNESS is but a partial darkness; and therefore it 
derives some of its powers from being mixed and surrounded 
with coloured bodies. In its own nature, it can not be con- 
sidered as a colour. Black bodies, reflecting none, or but a 
few rays, with regard to sight, are but as so many vacant 
spaces, dispersed among the objects we view. When the 
eye lights on one of these vacuities, after having been kept 
in some degree of tension by the play of the adjacent colours 
upon it, it suddenly falls into relaxation; out of which it as 
suddenly recovers by a convulsive spring. To illustrate 
this: let us consider that when we intend to sit on a chair, 
and find it much lower than was expected, the shock is very 
violent ; much more violent than could be thought from so 
slight a fall as the difference between one chair and another 
can possibly make. If, after descending a flight of stairs, 
we attempt inadvertently to take another step in the man- 
ner of the former ones, the shock is extremely rude and 
disagreeable: and by no art can we cause such a shock by 
the same means when we expect and prepare for it. When 
I say that this is owing to having the change made contrary 
to expectation; Ido not mean solely, when the mind ex- 


324 BURKE 


pects. I mean likewise, that when any organ of sense is for 
some time affected in some one manner, if it be suddenly 
affected otherwise, there ensues a ‘convulsive motion; such 
a convulsion as is caused when anything happens against 
the expectance of the mind. And though it may appear 
strange that such a change as produces a relaxation should 
immediately produce a sudden convulsion; it is yet most 
certainly so, and so in all senses. Every one knows that 
sleep is a relaxation; and that silence, where nothing keeps 
the organs of hearing in action, is in general fittest to bring 
on this relaxation; yet when a sort of murmuring sounds 
dispose a man to sleep, let these sounds cease suddenly, and 
the person immediately awakes ; that is, the parts are braced 
up suddenly, and he awakes. This I have often experienced 
myself, and I have heard the same from observing persons. 
In like manner, if a person in broad daylight were falling 
asleep, to introduce a sudden darkness would prevent his 
sleep for that time, though silence and darkness in them- 
selves, and not suddenly introduced, are very favourable to 
it. This I knew only by conjecture on the analogy of the 
senses when I first digested these observations; but I have 
since experienced it. And I have often experienced, and so 
have a thousand others, that on the first inclining towards 
sleep, we have been suddenly awakened with a most violent 
start; and that this start was generally preceded by a sort 
of dream of our falling down aprecipiece: whence does this 
strange motion arise, but from the too sudden relaxation of 
the body, which by some mechanism in nature restores it- 
self by as quick and vigorous an exertion of the contracting 
power of the muscles? The dream itself is caused by this 
relaxation ; and it is of too uniform a nature to be attributed 
to any other cause. The parts relax too suddenly, which is 
in the nature of falling; and this accident of the body in- 
duces this image in the mind. When we are in a confirm 
ed state of health and vigour, as all chnages are then less 
sudden, and less on the extreme, we can seldom complain of 
this disagreeable sensation. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 325 


SECTION XVIII 
THE EFFECTS OF BLACKNESS MODERATED 


THOUGH the effects of black be painful originally, we 
must not think they always continue so. Custom reconciles 
us to everything. After we have been used to the sight of 
black objects, the terror abates, and the smoothness and 
glossiness, or some agreeable accident of bodies so coloured, 
softens in some measure the horror and sternness of their 
original nature; yet the nature of the original impression still 
continues. Black willalways have something melancholy in 
it, because the sensory will always find the change to it from 
others colours too violent; or if it occupy the whole compass 
of the sight, it will then be darkness; and what was said of 
darkness will be applicable here. I do not purpose to go 
into all that might be said to illustrate this theory of the 
effects of light and darkness; neither will I examine all the 
different effects produced by the various modifications and 
mixtures of these two causes. If the foregoing observa- 
tions have any foundation in nature, I conceive them very 
sufficient to account for all the phenomena that can arise 
from all the combinations of black with other colours. To 
enter into every particular, or to answer every objection, 
would bean endless labour. We have only followed the most 
leading roads; and we shall observe the same conduct in our 
inquiry into the cause of beauty. 


SECTION XIX 
THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF LOVE 


WHEN we have before us such objects as excite love and 
complacency, the body is affected, so far as I could observe, 
much in the following manner: the head reclines something 
on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual, and the 
eyes roll gently with an inclination to the object; the mouth 


326 BURKE 


is a little opened, and the breath drawn slowly, with now and 
then a low sigh; the whole body is composed, and the hands 
fall idly to the sides. All this is accompanied with an in- 
ward sense of melting and languor. These appearances are 
always proportioned to the degree of beauty in the object, 
and of sensibility in the observer.. And this gradation from 
the highest pitch of beauty and sensibility, even to the 
lowest of mediocrity and indifference, and their correspond- 
ent effects, ought to be kept in view, else this description 
will seem exaggerated, which it certainly is not. But 
from this description it is almost impossible not to con- 
clude that beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole 
system. There are all the appearances of such a relaxation ; 
and a relaxation somewhat below the natural tone seems to 
me to be the cause of all positive pleasure. Who is a 
stranger to that manner of expression so common in all 
times and in all countries, of being softened, relaxed, ener- 
vated, dissolved, melted away by pleasure? The universal 
voice of mankind, faithful to their feelings, concurs in affirm- 
ing this uniform and general effect: and although some odd 
and particular instance may perhaps be found, wherein there 
appears a considerable degree of positive pleasure, without 
all the characters of relaxation, we must not therefore reject 
the conclusion we had drawn from a concurrence of many 
experiments; but we must still retain it, subjoining the ex- 
ceptions which may occur according to the judicious rule 
laid down by Sir Isaac Newton in the third book of his 
Optics. Our position will, I conceive, appear confirmed 
beyond any reasonable doubt, if we can show that such 
things as we have already observed to be the genuine con- 
stituents of beauty have each of them, separately taken, a 
natural tendency to relax the fibres. And if it must be 
allowed us, that the appearance of the human body, when all 
these constituents are united together before the sensory, 
further favours this opinion, we may venture, I believe, to 
conclude that the passion called love is produced by this re- 
laxation. By the same method of reasoning which we have 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 327 


used in the inquiry into the causes of the sublime, we may 
likewise conclude, that asa beautiful object presented to the 
sense, by causing a relaxation of the body, produces the pas- 
sion of love in the mind; so if by any means the passion 
should first have its origin in the mind, a relaxation of the 
outward organs will as certainly ensue in a degree propor- 
tioned to the cause. 


SECTION XX 
WHY SMOOTHNESS IS BEAUTIFUL 


IT is to explain the true cause of visual beauty thatI call 
in the assistance of the other senses. If it appears that 
smoothness is a principal cause of pleasure to the touch, 
taste, smell, and hearing, it will be easily admitted aconstit- 
uent of visual beauty; especially as we have before shown | 
that this quality is found almost without exception in all 
bodies that are by general consent held beautiful. There 
can be no doubt that bodies which are rough and angular, 
rouse and vellicate the organs of feeling, causing a sense of 
pain, which consists in the violent tension or contraction of 
the muscular fibres. On the contrary, the application of 
smooth bodies relaxes; gentle stroking witha smooth hand 
allays violent pains and cramps, and relaxes the suffering 
parts from their unnatural tension; and it has therefore very 
often no mean effect in removing swellings and obstructions, 
The sense of feeling is highly gratified with smooth bodies. 
A bed smoothly laid, and soft, that is, where the resistance 
is every way inconsiderable, is a great luxury, disposing to an 
universal relaxation, and inducing beyond anything else that 
species of it called sleep. 


328 BURKE 


SECTION XXI 
SWEETNESS, ITS NATURE 


NOR is it only in the touch that smooth bodies cause posi- 
tive pleasure by relaxation. In the smell and taste, we find 
all things agreeable to them, and which are commonly called 
sweet, to be of a smooth nature, and that they all evidently 
tend to relax their respective sensories. Let us first consider 
the taste. Since it is most easy to inquire into the property 
of liquors, and since all things seem to want a fluid vehicle to 
make them taste at all, I intend rather to consider the liquid 
than the solid parts of our food. The vehicles of all tastes 
are water and oil. And what determines its taste is some 
salt, which affects variously according to its nature, or its 
manner of being combined with other things. Water and 
oil, simply considered, are capable of giving some pleasure, to 
thetaste. Water, when simple, is insipid, inodorous, colour- 
less, and smooth; it is found, when not cold, to be a great 
resolver of spasms, and lubricator of the fibres; this power it 
probably owes to its smoothness. For as fluidity depends, 
according to the most general opinion, on the roundness, 
smoothness, and weak cohesion of the component parts of 
any body, and as water acts merely as a simple fluid, it fol- 
lows that the cause of its fluidity is likewise the cause of its 
relaxing quality, namely, the smoothness and slippery text- 
ure ofitsparts. The other fluid vehicle of tastes is oil. This 
too, when simple, is insipid, inodorous, colourless, and smooth 
to the touch and taste. It is smoother than water, and in 
many cases yet more relaxing. Oil is in some degree pleas- 
ant to the eye, the touch, and the taste, insipid as it is, 
Water is not so grateful; which I do not know on what 
principle to account for, other than that water is not so soft 
and smooth. Suppose that to this oil or water were added 
a certain quantity of a specific salt, which had a power of 
putting the nervous papille of the tongue into a gentle vibra- 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 329 


tory motion; as suppose sugar dissolved in it. The smooth- 
ness of the oil and the vibratory power of the salt cause the 
sense we call sweetness. Inall sweet bodies, sugar, or a sub- 
stance very little different from sugar, is constantly found. 
Every species of salt, examined by the microscope, has its 
own distinct, regular, invariable form. That of nitre is a 
pointed oblong; that of seasalt an exact cube; that of sugar 
a perfect globe. If you have tried how smooth globular 
bodies, as the marbles with which boys amuse themselves, 
have affected the touch when they are rolled backward and 
forward and over one another, you will easily conceive how 
sweetness, which consists in a salt of such nature, affects the 
taste; for a single globe (though somewhat pleasant to the 
feeling), yet by the regularity of its form, and the somewhat 
too sudden deviation of its parts from a right line, is nothing 
near so pleasant to the touch as several globes, where the 
hand gently rises to oneand falls to another ; and this pleasure 
is greatly increased if the globes are in motion, and sliding 
over one another; for this soft variety prevents that weari- 
ness, which the uniform disposition of the several globes 
would otherwise produce. Thus in sweet liquors, the parts of 
the fluid vehicle, though most probably round, are yet so mi- 
nute, as to conceal the figure of their component parts from 
the nicest inquisition of the microscope; and consequently, 
being so excessively minute, they have a sort of flat simplic- 
ity to the taste, resembling the effects of plain smooth bodies 
to the touch; for if a body be composed of round parts ex- 
cessively small, and packed pretty closely together, the sur- 
face will be both to the sight and touch as if it were nearly 
plain and smooth. It is clear from their unveiling their figure 
to the microscope, that the particles of sugar are considerably 
larger than those of water or oil, and consequently that their 
effects from their roundness will be more distinct and palpa- 
ble to the nervous papille of that nice organ the tongue; 
they will induce that sense called sweetness, which in a weak 
manner we discover in oil, and in a yet weaker in water; for, 
insipid as they are, water and oil are in some degree sweet ; 


330 BURKE 


and it may be observed, that insipid things of all kinds ap- 
proach more nearly to the nature of sweetness than to that 
of any other taste. 


SECTION XXII 


SWEETNESS RELAXING 


IN the other senses we have remarked, that smooth things 
are relaxing. Now it ought to appear that sweet things, 
which are the smooth of taste, are relaxing too. It is 
remarkable, that in some languages soft and sweet have but 
one name. Doux in French signifies soft as well as sweet. 
The Latin dulcis, and the Italian dolce, have in many cases " 
the same double signification. That sweet things are gen- 
erally relaxing, is evident ; because all such, especially those 
which are most oily, taken frequently, or in a large quantity, 
very much enfeeble the tone of the stomach. Sweet smells, 
which bear a great affinity to sweet tastes, relax very remark- 
ably. The smell of flowers disposes people to drowsiness ; 
and this relaxing effect is further apparent from the prejudice 
which people of weak nerves receive from their use. It were 
worth while to examine, whether tastes of this kind, sweet 
ones, tastes that are caused by smooth oils anda relaxing 
salt, are not the originally pleasant tastes. For many, which 
use has rendered such, were not at all agreeable at first. The 
way to examine this is, to try what nature has originally 
provided for us, which she has undoubtedly made originally 
pleasant ; and to analyze this provision. Milk is the first 
support of our childhood. The component parts of this are 
water, oil, and a sort of a very sweet salt, called the sugar of 
milk. All these when blended have a great smoothness to 
the taste, and a relaxing quality to the skin. The next 
thing children covet is fruit, and of fruits those principally 
which are sweet ; and every one knows that the sweetness 
of fruit is caused by a subtle oil, and sucha salt as that 
mentioned in the last section. Afterwards custom, habit, the 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 331 


desire of novelty, and a thousand other causes, confound, 
adulterate, and change our palates, so that we can no longer 
reason with any satisfaction about them. Before we quit 
this article, we must observe, that as smooth things are, as 
such, agreeable to the taste, and are found of a relaxing 
quality ; so on the other hand, things which are found by 
experience to be of a strengthening quality, and fit to brace 
the fibres, are almost universally rough and pungent to the 
taste, and in many cases rough even tothe touch. We often 
apply the quality of sweetness, metaphorically, to visual 
objects. For the better carrying on this remarkable analogy 
of the senses, we may here call sweetness the beautiful of 
the taste. 


SECTION XXIII 


VARIATION, WHY BEAUTIFUL 


ANOTHER principal property of beautiful objects is, that 
the line of their parts is continually varying its direction ; 
but it varies it by a very insensible deviation; it never varies 
it so quickly as to surprise, or by the sharpness of its angle 
to cause any twitching or convulsion of the optic nerve. 
Nothing long continued in the same manner, nothing very 
suddenly varied, can be beautiful; because both are op- 
posite to that agreeable relaxation which is the characteristic 
effect of beauty. It is thus in all the senses. A motion in 
a right line is that manner of moving, next to a very gentle 
descent, in which we meet the least resistance; yet it is not 
that manner of moving, which next to a descent, wearies us 
the least. Rest certainly tends to relax: yet there is a 
species of motion which relaxes more than rest ; a gentle 
oscillatory motion, a rising and falling. Rocking sets chil- 
dren to sleep better than absolute rest; there is indeed 
scarcely anything at that age, which gives more pleasure 
than to be gently lifted up and down; the-manner of play- 
ing which their nurses use with children, and the weighing 


332 BURKE 


and swinging used afterwards by themselves as a favourite 
amusement, evince this very sufficiently. Most people must 
have observed the sort of sense they have had on being 
swiftly drawn in an easy coach on a smooth turf, with grad- 
ual ascents and declivities. This will give a better idea of 
the beautiful, and point out its probable cause better, than 
almost anything else. On the contrary, when one is hurried 
over a rough, rocky, broken road, the pain felt by these 
sudden inequalities shows why similar sights, feelings, and 
sounds, are so contrary to beauty: and with regard to the 
feeling, it is exactly the same in its effect, or very nearly the 
same, whether, for instance, I move my hand along the sur- 
face of a body of a certain shape, or whether such a body is 
moved along my hand. But to bring this analogy of the 
senses home to the eye; if a body presented to that sense 
has such a waving surface, that the rays of light reflected 
from.it are in a continual insensible deviation from the 
strongest to the weakest (which is always the case in a sur- 
face gradually unequal), it must be exactly similar in its 
effects on the eye and touch; upon the one of which it 
operates directly, on the other indirectly. And this body 
will be beautiful if the lines which compose its surface are 
not continued, even so varied, ina manner that may weary 
or dissipate the attention. The variation itself must be con- 
tinually varied. | 


SECTION XXIV: 


CONCERNING SMALLNESS 


To avoid a sameness which may arise from the too fre- 
quent repetition of the same reasonings, and of illustrations 
of the same nature, I will not enter very minutely into every 
particular that regards beauty, as it is founded on the dis- 
position of its quantity, or its quantity itself. In speaking 
of the magnitude of bodies there is great uncertainty, be- 
cause the ideas of great and small are terms almost entirely 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 333 


relative to the species of the objects, which are infinite. It 
is true, that having once fixed the species of any object, and 
the dimensions common in the individuals of that species, 
we may observe some that exceed, and some that fall short 
of, the ordinary standard: those which greatly exceed are, 
by that excess, provided the species itself be not very small, 
rather great and terrible than beautiful ; but as in the animal 
world, and in a good measure in the vegetable world like- 
wise, the qualities that constitute beauty may possibly be 
united to things of greater dimensions; when they are so 
united, they constitute a species something different both 
from the sublime and beautiful, which I have before called 
fine; but this kind, I imagine, has not such a power on the 
passions, either as vast bodies have which are endued with 
the correspondent qualities of the sublime; or as the quali- 
ties of beauty have when united in a small object. The 
affection produced by large bodies adorned with the spoils 
of beauty, is a tension continually relieved; which ap- 
proaches to the nature of mediocrity. But if I were to say 
how I find myself affected upon such occasions, I should say 
that the sublime suffers less by being united to some of the 
qualities of beauty, than beauty does by being joined to 
greatness of quantity, or any othef properties of the sublime. 
There is something so overruling in whatever inspires us with 
awe, in all things which belong ever so remotely to terror, 
that nothing else can stand in their presence. There lie the 
qualities of beauty either dead or unoperative; or at most 
exerted to mollify the rigour and sternness of the terror, 
which is the natural concomitant of greatness. Besides the 
extraordinary great in every species, the opposite to this, 
the dwarfish and diminutive, ought to be considered. Little- 
ness, merely as such, has nothing contrary to the idea of 
beauty. The humming-bird, both in shape and colouring, 
yields to none of the winged species, of which it is the least ; 
and perhaps his beauty is enhanced by his smallness. But 
there are animals, which, when they are extremely small, are 
rarely (if ever) beautiful. There is a dwarfish size of men 


334 BURKE 


and women, which is almost constantly so gross and massive 
in comparison of their height, that they present us with a 
very disagreeable image. But should a man be found not 
above two or three feet high, supposing such a person to 
have all the parts of his body of a delicacy suitable to such 
a size, and otherwise endued with the common qualities 
of other beautiful bodies, I am pretty well convinced that a 
person of such a stature might be considered as beautiful ; 
might be the object of love; might give us very pleasing 
ideas on viewing him. The only thing which could possibly 
interpose to check our pleasure is, that such creatures, how- 
ever formed, are unusual, and are often therefore considered 
as something monstrous. The large and gigantic, though 
very compatible with the sublime, is contrary to the beauti- 
ful. It is impossible to suppose a giant the object of love. 
When we let our imagination loose in romance, the ideas we 
naturally annex to that size are those of tyranny, cruelty, 
injustice, and everything horrid and abominable. We paint 
the giant ravaging the country, plundering the innocent 
traveller, and afterwards gorged with his half-living flesh: 
such are Polyphemus, Cacus, and others, who make so great 
a figure in romances and heroic poems. The event we attend 
to with the greatest satisfaction is their defeat and death. I 
do not remember, in all that multitude of deaths with which 
the “ Iliad ”’ is filled, that the fall of any man, remarkable for 
his great stature and strength, touches us with pity; nor 
does it appear that the author, so well read in human nature, 
ever intended it should. It is Simoisius, in the soft bloom 
of youth, torn from his parents, who tremble for a courage 
so ill suited to his strength; it is another hurried by war 
from the new embraces of his bride, young and fair, anda 
novice to the field, who melts us by his untimely fate. 
Achilles, in spite of the many qualities of beauty which 
Homer has bestowed on his outward form, and the many 
great virtues with which he has adorned his mind, can never 
make us love him. It may be observed, that Homer has 
given the Trojans, whose fate he has designed to excite our 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 335 


compassion, infinitely more of the amiable, social virtues than 
he has distributed among his Greeks. With regard to the 
Trojans, the passion he chooses to raise is pity; pity is a 
passion founded on love; and these lesser, and if I may say 
domestic virtues, are certainly the most amiable. But he has 
made the Greeks far their superiors in the politic and mili- 
tary virtues. The councils of Priam are weak; the arms of 
Hector comparatively feeble; his courage far below that of 
Achilles. Yet we love Priam more than Agamemnon, and 
Hector more than his conqueror Achilles. Admiration is 
the passion which Homer would excite in favour of the 
Greeks, and he has done it by bestowing on them the virtues 
which have but little to do with love. This short digres- 
sion is perhaps not wholly beside our purpose, where our 
business is to show that objects of great dimensions are in- 
compatible with beauty, the more incompatible as they are 
greater; whereas the small, if ever they fail of beauty, this 
failure is not to be attributed to their size. 


SECTION XXV 


OF COLOUR 


WITH regard to colour, the disquisition is almost infinite , 
but I conceive the principles laid down in the beginning of 
this part are sufficient to account for the effects of them all, 
as well as for the agreeable effects of transparent bodies, 
whether fluid or solid. Suppose Ilookat a bottle of muddy 
liquor, of a blue or red colour; the blue or red rayscan not 
pass clearly to the eye, but are suddenly and unequally 
stopped by the intervention of little opaque bodies, which 
without preparation change the idea, and change it too into 
one disagreeable in its own nature, conformably to the prin- 
ciples laid down in Sect. 24. But when the ray passes with- 
out such opposition through the glass or liquor, when the 
glass or liquor is quite transparent, the light is sometimes 
softened in the passage, which makes it more agreeable even 


336 BURKE 


as light; and the liquor reflecting all the rays of its proper 
colour evenly, it has such an effect on the eye, as smooth 
opaque bodies have on the eye and touch. So that the 
pleasure here is compounded of the softness of the trans- 
mitted, and the evenness of the reflected light. This pleas- 
ure may be heightened by the common principles in other 
things, if the shape of the glass which holds the transparent 
liquor be so judiciously varied, as to present the colour gradu- 
ally and interchangeably, weakened and strengthened with 
all the variety which judgment in affairs of this nature shall 
suggest. On a review ofall that has been said of the effects, . 
as well as the causes of both, it will appear that the sublime 
and beautiful are built on principles very different, and that 
their affections are as different: the great has terror for its 
basis, which, when it is modified, causes that emotion in the 
mind, which I have called astonishment; the beautiful is 
founded on mere positive pleasure, and excites in the soul 
that feeling which is called love. Their causes have made 
the subject of this fourth part. 


PART FIFTH 


SECTION I 
OF WORDS 


ATURAL objects affect us by the laws of that connec- 
tion which Providence has established between certain 
motions and configurations of bodies, and certain consequent 
feelings in our mind. Painting affects in the same manner, 
but with the superadded pleasure of imitation. Architecture 
affects by the laws of nature and the law of reason; from 
which latter result the rules of proportion, which make a 
work to be praised or censured, in the whole or in some 
part, when the end for which it was. designed is or is not 
properly answered. But as to words; they seem to me to 
affect us in a manner very different from that in which we . 
are affected by natural objects, or by painting or architect- 
ure; yet words have as considerable a share in exciting ideas 
of beauty and of the sublime as many of those, and some- 
times a much greater than any of them; therefore an inquiry 
into the manner by which they excite such emotions is far 
from being unnecessary in a discourse of this kind. 


SECTION II 


THE COMMON EFFECTS OF POETRY, NOT BY RAISING IDEAS 
OF THINGS 


THE common notion of the power of poetry and elo- 
quence, as well as that of words in ordinary conversation, is, 
that they affect the mind by raising in it ideas of those 
things for which custom has appointed them to stand. 
To examine the truth of this notion, it may be requisite to 

22 337 


338 BURKE 


observe that words may be divided into three sorts. The 
first are such as represent many simple ideas united by nature 
to form some one determinate composition, as man, horse, 
tree, castle, etc. These I call aggregate words. The second 
are they that stand for one simple idea of such compositions, 
and no more; as red, blue, round, square, and the like. 
These I call simple abstract words. The third are those 
which are formed by an union, an arbitrary union of both 
the others, and of the various relations between them in 
greater or lesser degrees of complexity; as virtue, honour, 
persuasion, magistrate, and the like. These I call compound 
abstract words. Words, I am sensible, are capable of being 
classed into more curious distinctions; but these seem to 
be natural, and enough for our purpose; and they are dis- 
posed in that order in which they are commonly taught, and 
in which the mind gets the ideas they are substituted for. 
I shall begin with the third sort of words; compound ab- 
stracts, such as virtue, honour, persuasion, docility. Of these 
I.am convinced, that whatever power they may have on the 
passions, they do not derive it from any representation 
raised in the mind of the things for which they stand. As 
compositions, they.are not real essences, and hardly cause, I 
think, any real ideas. Nobody, I believe, immediately on 
hearing the sounds, virtue, liberty, or honour, conceives any 
precise notions of the particular modes of action and think- 
ing, together with the mixed and simple ideas, and the 
several relations of them for which these words are sub- 
stituted; neither has he any general idea compounded of 
them; for if he had, then some of those particular ones, 
though indistinct perhaps, and confused, might come soon _~ 
to be perceived. But this, I take it, is hardly ever the case. 
For, put yourself upon analyzing one of these words, and 
you must reduce it from one set of general words to another, 
and then into the simple abstracts and aggregates, in a 
much longer series than may be at first imagined, before any 
real idea emerges to light, before you come to discover any- 
thing like the first principles of such compositions; and 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 339 


when you have made such a discovery of the original ideas, 
the effect of the composition is utterly lost. A train of 
thinking of this sort is much too long to be pursued in the 
ordinary ways of conversation ; nor is it at all necessary that 
it should. Such words are in reality but mere sounds; but 
they are sounds which being used on particular occasions, 
- wherein we receive some good, or suffer some evil; or see 
others affected with good or evil; or which we hear applied 
to other interesting things or events; and being applied in 
such a variety of cases, that we know readily by habit to what 
things they belong, they produce in the mind, whenever 
they are afterwards mentioned, effects similar to those of 
their occasions. The sounds being often used without ref- 
erence to any particular occasion, and carrying still their 
first impressions, they at last utterly lose their connection 
with the particular occasions that gave rise to them; yet the 
sound, without any annexed notion, continues to operate a& 
before. 


SECTION III 
GENERAL WORDS BEFORE IDEAS 


Mr. LOCKE has somewhere observed, with his usual saga- 
city, that most general words, those belonging to virtue and 
vice, good and evil especially, are taught before the particular 
modes of action to which they belong are presented to the 
mind; and with them, the love of the one, and the abhor- 
rence of the other; for the minds of children are so ductile, 
that a nurse, or any person about achild, by seeming pleased 
or displeased with anything, or even any word, may give the 
disposition of the child a similar turn. When, afterwards, 
the several occurrences in life come to be applied to these 
words, and that which is pleasant often appears under the 
name of evil; and what is disagreeable to nature is called 
good and virtuous; a strange confusion of ideas and affec- 
tions arises in the minds of many; and an appearance of no 
small contradiction between their notions and their actions. 


340 | BURKE 


There. are many who love virtue and who detest vice, and 
this not from hypocrisy or affectation, who notwithstand- 
ing very frequently act ill and wickedly in particulars with- 
out the least remorse; because these particular occasions 
never came into view, when the passions on the side of vir- 
tue were so warmly affected by certain words heated origi- 
nally by the breath of others ; and for this reason, it is hard ° 
to repeat certain sets of words, though owned by themselves 
unoperative, without being in some degree affected; espe- 
cially if a warm and affecting tone of voice accompanies 
them, as suppose, 


“ Wise, valiant, generous, good, and great.” 


These words, by having no application, ought to be unoper- 
ative; but when words commonly sacred to great occasions 
are used, we areaffected by them even without the occasions. 
When words which have been generally so applied are put 
together without any rational view, or in such a manner that 
they do not rightly agree with each other, the style is called 
bombast. And it requires in several cases much good sense 
and experience to be guarded against the force of such 
language; for when propriety is neglected, a greater number 
of these affecting words may be taken into the service, and 
a greater variety may be indulged in combining them, , 


SECTION IV 
THE EFFECT OF WORDS 


IF words have all their possible extent of power, three 
effects arise in the mind of the hearer. The first is, the 
sound; the second, the picture, or representation of the 
thing signified by the sound; the third is, the affection of 
the soul produced by one or by both of the foregoing. 
Compounded abstract words, of which we have been speak- 
ing (honor, justice, liberty, and the like), produce the first 
and the last of these effects, but not the second. Simple 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 341 


abstracts are used to signify some one simple idea without 
much adverting to others which may chance to attend it, as 
blue, green, hot, cold, and the like; these are capable of 
affecting all three of the purposes of words; as the aggre- 
gate words, man, castle, horse, etc., are ina yet higher degree. 
But I am of opinion, that the most general effect, even of 
these. words, does not arise from their forming pictures of 
the several things they would represent in the imagination; 
because, on a very diligent examination of my own mind, 
and getting others to consider theirs, I do not find that once 
in twenty times any such picture is formed, and when it is, 
there is most commonly a particular effort of the imagin- 
ation for that purpose. But the aggregate words operate, 
as I said of the compound-abstracts, not by presenting any 
image to the mind, but by having from use the same effect 
on being mentioned, that their original has when it is seen. 
Suppose we were to read a passage to this effect: ‘‘ The 
river Danube rises in a moist and mountainous soil in the 
heart of Germany, where, winding to and fro, it waters sev- 
eral principalities, until, turning into Austria, and laving 
the walls of Vienna, it passes into Hungary; there witha 
vast flood, augmented by the Save and the Drave, it quits 
Christendom, and rolling through the barbarous countries 
which border on Tartary, it enters by many mouths in the 
Black Sea.” In this description many things are mentioned, 
as mountains, rivers, cities, the sea, etc. But let anybody 
examine himself, and see whether he has had impressed on 
his imagination any pictures of a river, mountain, watery 
soil, Germany, etc. Indeed it is impossible, in the rapidity 
and quick succession of words in conversation, to have ideas 
both of the sound of the word, and of the thing represented ; 
besides, some words, expressing real essences, are so mixed 
with others of a general and nominal import, that it is im- 
practicable to jump from sense to thought, from particulars 
to generals, from things to words, in such a manner as to 
answer the purposes of life; nor is it necessary that we 
should. | 


342 BURKE 


SECTION V 


EXAMPLES THAT WORDS MAY AFFECT WITHOUT 
RAISING IMAGES 


I FIND it very hard to persuade several that their passions 
are affected by words from whence they have no ideas ; and 
yet harder to convince them that in the ordinary course of 
conversation we are sufficiently understood without raising 
any images of the things concerning which we speak. It 
seems to be an odd subject of dispute with any man, whether 
he has ideas in his mind or not. Of this, at first view, every 
man, in his own forum, ought to judge without appeal. 
But, strange as it may appear, we are often at a loss to know 
what ideas we have of things, or whether we have any ideas 
at all upon some subjects. It even requires a good deal of 
attention to be thoroughly satisfied on this head. Since I 
wrote these papers, I found two very striking instances of 
the possibility there is, that a man may hear words without 
having any idea of the things which they represent, and yet 
afterwards be capable of returning them to others, combined 
in a new way, and with great propriety, energy, and instruc- 
tion. The first instance is that of Mr. Blacklock, a poet 
blind from his birth. Few men blessed with the most per- 
fect sight can describe visual objects with more spirit and 
justness than this blind man ; which can not possibly be 
attributed to his having aclearer conception of the things 
he describes than is common to other persons. Mr. Spence, 
in an elegant preface which he has written to the works of 
this poet, reasons very ingeniously, and, I imagine, for the 
most part, very rightly, upon the cause of this extraordinary 
phenomenon ; but I can not altogether agree with him, that 
some improprieties in language and thought, which occur in 
these poems, have arisen from the blind poet’s imperfect 
conception of visual objects, since such improprieties, and 
much greater, may be found in writers even of a higher class 
than Mr. Blacklock, and who, notwithstanding, possessed 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 343 


the faculty of seeing in its full perfection. Here is a poet 
' doubtless as much affected by his own descriptions as any 
that reads them can be; and yet he is affected with this 
strong enthusiasm by things of which he neither has, nor 
can possibly have, any idea further than that of a bare 
sound: and why may not those who read his works be affec- 
ted in the same manner that he was; with as little of any real 
ideas of the things described? The second instance is of 
Mr. Saunderson, professor of mathematics in the University 
of Cambridge. This learned man had acquired great knowl- 
edge in natural philosophy, in astronomy, and whatever 
sciences depend upon mathematical skill, What was the 
most extraordinary and the most to my purpose, he gave 
excellent lectures upon light and colours; and this man 
taught others the theory of those ideas which they had, and 
which he himself undoubtedly had not. But it is probable 
that the words red, blue, green, answered to him as well as 
the ideas of the colours themselves ; for the ideas of greater 
or lesser degrees of refrangibility being applied to these 
words, and the blind man being instructed in what other re- 
spects they were found to agree or to disagree, it was as easy 
for him to reason upon the words as if he had been fully master 
of the ideas. Indeed it must be owned he could makeno new 
discoveries in the way of experiment. He did nothing but 
what we do every day incommon discourse. When I wrote 
this last sentence, and used the words every day and com- 
mon discourse, I had no images in my mind of any succes- 
sion of time; nor of men in conference with each other; nor 
do I imagine that the reader will have any such ideas on 
reading it. Neither when I spoke of red, or blue, and green, 
as well as refrangibility, had I these several colours, or the 
rays of light passing into a different medium, and there di- 
verted from their course, painted before me in the way of 
images. I know very well that the mind possesses a faculty 
of raising such images at pleasure ; but then an act of the 
will is necessary to this ; and in ordinary conversation or 
reading it is very rarely that any image at all is excited in 


2AA BURKE 


the mind. IfI say, “I shall go to Italy next summer,” TI 
am well understood. Yet I believe nobody has by this 
painted in his imagination the exact figure of the speaker 
passing by land or by water, or both ; sometimes on horse- 
back, sometimes in a carriage: with all the particulars of the 
journey. Still less has he any idea of Italy, the country to 
which I proposed to go; or of the greenness of the fields, 
the ripening of the fruits, and the warmth of the air, with 
the change to this from a different season, which are the 
ideas for which the word summer is substituted ; but least 
of all has he any image from the word next ; for this word 
stands for the idea of many summers, with the exclusion of 
all but one: and surely the man who says next summer has 
no images of such a succession, and such an exclusion. In 
short, it is not only of those ideas which are commonly 
called abstract, and of which no image at all can be formed, 
but even of particular, real beings, that we converse with- 
out having any idea of them excited in the imagination ; as 
will certainly appear on a diligent examination of our own 
minds. Indeed, so little does poetry depend for its effect 
onthe power of raising sensible images, that I am convinced 
it would lose a very considerable part of its energy, if this were 
the necessary result of all description. Because that union 
of affecting words, which is the most powerful of all poetical 
instruments, would frequently lose its force along with its 
propriety and consistency, if the sensible images were always 
excited. There is not, perhaps,in the whole “AZ neid” amore 
grand and laboured passage than the description of Vulcan’s 
cavern in Etna, and the works that are there carried on. 
Virgil dwells particularly on the formation of the thunder 
which he describes unfinished under the hammers of the 
Cyclops. But what are the principles of this extraordinary 
composition ? 


Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosz 
Addiderant; rutili tres ignis, et alitis austri : 
Fulgores nunc terrificos, sonitumque, metumque 
Miscebant operi, flammisque sequacibus iras. 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 345 


This seems to me admirably sublime: yet if we attend 
coolly to the kind of sensible images which a combination 
of ideas of this sort must form, the chimeras of madmen can 
not appear more wild and absurd than such a picture. 
“ Three rays of twisted showers, three of watery clouds, three 
of fire, and three of the winged south wind; then mixed they 
in the work terrific lightnings, and sound, and fear, and 
anger, with pursuing flames.” This strange composition is 
formed into a gross body; it is hammered by the Cyclops, it 
is in part polished and partly continues rough. The truth 
is, if poetry gives us a noble assemblage of words corre- 
sponding to many noble ideas, which are connected by cir- 
cumstances of time or place, or related to each other as cause 
and effect, or associated in any natural way, they may be 
moulded together in any form, and perfectly answer their 
end. The picturesque connection is not demanded; be- 
cause no real picture is formed; nor is the effect of the de- 
scription at all the less upon this account. What is said of 
Helen by Priam and the old men of his council, is generally 
thought to give us the highest possible idea of that fatal 
beauty. 


Ob véueowc, Tp@ac Kai eixvpuidac ’A yaLod¢ 

To190" agi yuvarki moddv ypdvov adyea racyeww 

Alvég abavaryor Hene ei¢ Ora Eouxev, 
“ They cried,‘ Nowonder such celestial charms 

For nine long years have set the world in arms ; 

What winning graces! what majestic mien! 

She moves a goddess, and she looks a queen.’” 

POPE, 


Here is not one word said of the particulars of her beauty; 
nothing which can in the least help us to any precise idea of 
her person; but yet we are much more touched by this 
manner of mentioning her, than by those long and laboured 
descriptions of Helen, whether handed down by tradition, 
or formed by fancy, which are to be met with in some authors. 
I am sure it affects me much more than the minute descrip- 
tion which Spenser has given of Belphebe; though I own 


346 BURKE 


that there are parts in that description, as there are in all the 
descriptions of that excellent writer, extremely fine and 
poetical. The terrible picture which Lucretius has drawn of 
religion in order to display the magnanimity of his philo- . 
sophical hero in opposing her, is thought to be designed 
with great boldness and spirit :— 


Humana ante oculos feedé cum vita jaceret, 
In terris, oppressa gravi sub religione, 

Quez caput e ceeli regionibus ostendebat 
Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans ; 
Primus Graius homo mortales tollere contra 
Est oculos ausus. 


What idea do you derive from so excellent a picture? none 
at all, most certainly: neither has the poet said a single 
word which might in the least serve to mark a single limb or 
feature of the phantom, which he intended to represent in 
all the horrors imagination can conceive. In reality, poetry 
and rhetoric do not succeed in exact description so well as 
painting does; their business is, to affect rather by sympathy 
than imitation; to display rather the effect of things on the 
minds of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear 
idea of the things themselves. This is their most extensive 
province, and that in which they succeed the best. 


SECTION VI 
POETRY NOT STRICTLY AN IMITATIVE ART 


HENCE we may observe that poetry, taken in its most 
general sense, can not with strict propriety be called an art 
of imitation. It is indeed an imitation so far as it describes 
the manners and passions of men which their words can ex- 
press ; where “ animi motus effert interprete lingua.” There 
it is strictly imitation ; and all merely dramatic poetry is of 
this sort. But descriptive poetry operates chiefly by sub- 
stitution; by the means of sounds, which by custom have’ 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 347 


the effect of realities. “Nothing is an imitation further than 
as it resembles some other thing; and words undoubtedly 
have no sort of resemblance to the ideas for which they 
stand. 


Sepa VL L 
HOW WORDS INFLUENCE THE PASSIONS 


Now, as words affect, not by any original power, but by 
representation, it might be supposed, that their influence 
over the passions should be but light; yet it is quite other- 
wise; for we find by experience, that eloquence and poetry 
are as capable, nay indeed much more capable, of making 
deep and lively impressions than any other arts, and even 
than nature itself in very many cases. And this arises 
chiefly from these three causes. First, that we take an ex- 
traordinary part in the passions of others, and that we are 
easily affected and brought into sympathy by any tokens 
which are shown of them; and there are no tokens which 
can express all the circumstances of most passions so fully 
as words; so that if a person speaks upon any subject, he 
can not only convey the subject to you, but likewise the 
manner in which he is himself affected by it. Certain it is, 
that the influence of most things on our passions is not so 
much from the things themselves, as from our opinions con- 
cerning them; and these again depend very much on the 
opinions of other men, conveyable for the most part by 
‘words only. Secondly, there are many things of a very af- 
fecting nature, which can seldom occur in the reality, but 
the words that represent them often do; and thus they have 
an opportunity of making a deep impression and taking root 
in the mind, whilst the idea of the reality was transient ; and 
to some perhaps never really occurred in any shape, to whom 
it is notwithstanding very affecting, as war, death, famine, © 
etc. Besides many ideas have never been at all presented to 
the senses of any men but by words, as God, angels, devils, 


348 BURKE 


heaven, and hell, all of which have however a great in- 
fluence over the passions. Thirdly, by words we have it in 
our power to make such combinations as we can not possibly 
do otherwise. By this power of combining we are able, by 
the addition of well-chosen circumstances, to give a new life 
and force to the simple object. In painting we may rep- 
resent any fine figure we please; but we never can give it 
those enlivening touches which it may receive from words. 
To represent an angel in a picture, you can only drawa 
beautiful young man winged: but what painting can furnish 
out anything so grand as the addition of one word, “the 
angel of the Lord?” It is true, I have here no clear idea; 
but these words affect the mind more than the sensible 
image did; which is all I contend for. A picture of Priam 
dragged to the altar’s foot, and there murdered, if it were 
well. executed, would undoubtedly be very moving; but 
there are very aggravating citchmstanens, which it could 
never represent: 


Sanguine foedantem guos ifse sacraverat ignes. 
As a further instance, let us consider those lines of Milton, 


where he describes the travels of the fallen angels through 
their dismal habitation: 


“ O’er many a dark and dreary vale 
They passed, and many a region dolorous ; 
O’er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp; 
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death, 
A universe of death.” 


Here is displayed the force of union in 
“ Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens, and shades.” 


which yet would lose the greatest part of their effect, if 
they were not the 


“Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens, and shades—of Death.” 


This idea or this affection caused by a word, which noth- 
ing but a word could annex to the others, raises a very 


ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 349 


great degree of the sublime, and this sublime is raised yet 
higher by what follows, a “universe of death.” Here are 
again two ideas not presentable but by language, and an union 
of them great and amazing beyond conception; if they may 
properly be called ideas which present no distinct image to 
the mind; but still it will be difficult to conceive how 
words can move the passions which belong to real objects 
without representing these objects clearly. This is difficult 
to us, because we do not sufficiently distinguish, in our ob- 
servations upon language, between a clear expression and a 
strong expression. These are frequently confounded with 
each other, though they are in reality extremely different. 
The former regards the understanding, the latter belongs to 
the passions. The one describesa thing as it is, the latter 
describes it as it is felt. Now, asthereis a moving tone of 
voice, an impassioned countenance, an agitated gesture, 
which affect independently of the things about which they 
are exerted, so there are words, and certain dispositions of 
words, which being peculiarly devoted to passionate subjects, 
and always used by those who are under the influence of any 
passion, touch and move us more than those which far 
more clearly and distinctly express the subject-matter. We 
yield to sympathy what we refuse to description. The 
truth is, all verbal description, merely as naked description, 
though never so exact, conveys so poor and insufficient an 
idea of the thing described, that it could scarcely have the 
smallest effect, if the speaker did not callin to his aid those 
modes of speech that mark a strong and lively feeling in 
himself. Then, by the contagion of our passions, we catch 
a fire already kindled in another, which probably might 
never have been struck out by the object described. Words, 
by strongly conveying the passions by those means which 
we have already mentioned, fully compensate for their weak- 
ness in other respects. It may be observed, that very pol- 
ished languages, and such’as are praised for their superior 
clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in strength, 
The French language has that perfection and that defect. 


350 BURKE 


Whereas the Oriental tongues, and in general the languages 
of most unpolished people, have a great force and energy of 
expression, and thisis but natural. Uncultivated people are 
but ordinary observers of things, and not critical in distin- 
guishing them; but, for that reason they admire more, and 
are more affected with what they see, and therefore express 
themselves in a warmer and more passionate manner. If 
the affection be well conveyed, it will work its effect without 
any clear idea, often without any idea at all of the thing which 
has originally given rise to it. 

It might be expected, from the fertility of the subject, 
that I should consider poetry, as it regards the sublime and 
beautiful, more at large; but it must be observed, that in 
this light it has been often and well handledalready. It was 
not my design to enter into the criticism of the sublime and 
beautiful in any art, but to attempt to lay down such prin- 
ciples as may tend to ascertain, to distinguish, and to form 
a sort of standard for them; which purposes I thought 
might be best effected by an inquiry into the properties of 
such things in nature, as raise love and astonishment in us; 
and by showing in what, manner they operated to produce 
these passions. . Words were only so far to be considered as 
to show upon what principle they were capable of being the 
representatives of these natural things, and by what powers 
they were able to affect us often as strongly asthe things they 
represent, and sometimes much more strongly. 


REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION 
| IN FRANCE 


REFLECTIONS 


ON THE 


Mev on OU LON UN ERAN CE 


AND ON 


THE PROCEEDINGS IN CERTAIN SOCIETIES IN LONDON 
RELATIVE TO THAT EVENT: 


UNG watts bal ake 


INTENDED TO HAVE BEEN SENT TO A GENTLEMAN IN PARIS 
1790 


lie may not be unnecessary to inform the reader that the following Reflec- 
tions had their origin in a correspondence between the author and a very 
young gentleman at Paris, who did him the honour of desiring his opinion 
upon the important transactions which then, and ever since have, so much occu- 
pied the attention of all men. An answer was written some time in the month 
of October, 1789; but it was kept back upon prudential considerations. That 
letter is alluded to in the beginning of the following sheets. It has been since 
forwarded to the person to whom it was addressed. The reasons for the delay 
in sending it were assigned in a short letter to the same gentleman. This pro- 
duced on his part a newand pressing application for the author’s sentiments. 
The author began a second and more full discussion on the subject. This he 
had some thoughts of publishing early in the last spring; but the matter 
gaining upon him, he found that what he had undertaken not only far ex- 
ceeded the measure of a letter, but that its importance required rather a more 
detailed consideration than at that time he had any leisure to bestow upon it. 
However, having thrown down his first thoughts in the form of a letter, and, 
indeed, when he sat down to write, having intended it for a private letter, he 
found it difficult to change the form of address, when his sentiments had grown 
into a greater extent and had received another direction. A different plan, he 
is sensible, might be more favourable to a commodious division and distribution 
of his matter, 


EAR SIR,—You are pleased to call again, and with 

some earnestness, for my thoughts on the late proceed- 

ings in France. I will not give you reason to imagine that 

I think my sentiments of such value as to wish myself to 
23 one 


354 BURKE 


be solicited about them. They are of too little consequence 
to be very anxiously either communicated or withheld. It 
was from attention to you, and to you only, that I hesitated 
at the time when you first desired to receive them. In 
the first letter I had the honour to write to you, and which 
at length I send, I wrote neither for nor from any description 
of men; nor shall I in this. My errors, ifany, are my own. 
My reputation alone is to answer for them. 

You see, Sir, by the long letter I have transmitted to you, 
that, though I do most heartily wish that France may be 
animated by a spirit of rational liberty, and that I think you 
bound, in all honest policy, to provide a permanent body in 
which that spirit may reside, and an effectual organ by which 
it may act, it is my misfortune to entertain great doubts con- 
cerning several material points in your late transactions. 

You imagined, when you wrote last, that I might possibly 
be reckoned among the approvers of certain proceedings in 
France, from the solemn public seal of sanction they have 
received from two clubs of gentlemen in London, called the 
Constitutional Society, and the Revolution Society. 

I certainly have the honour to belong to more clubs than 
one in which the Constitution of this kingdom and the 
principles of the glorious Revolution are held in high rever- 
ence; and I reckon myself among the most forward in my 
zeal for maintaining that Constitution and those principles in 
their utmost purity and vigour. Itis because I doso that I 
think it necessary forme that there should be no mistake. 
Those who cultivate the memory of our Revolution, and those 
who are attached to the Constitution of this kingdom, will 
take good care how they are involved with persons who, under 
the pretext of zeal towards the Revolution and Constitution, 
too frequently wander from their true principles, and are ready 
on every occasion to depart from the firm, but cautious and de- 
liberate, spirit which produced the one and which presides in 
the other. Before I proceedto answer the more material par- 
ticulars in your letter, I shall beg leave to give you such infor- 
mationas I have been able to obtain of the two clubs which 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 355 


have thought proper, as bodies, to interfere in the concerns of 
France,—first assuring you that Iam not, and that I have 
never been, a member of either of those societies. 

The first, calling itself the Constitutional Society, or 
Society for Constitutional Information, or by some such title, 
is, I believe, of seven or eight years’ standing. The institu- 
tion of this society appears to be of a charitable, and so far 
of a laudable nature: it was intended for the circulation, at 
the expense of the members, of many books which few others 
would be at the expense of buying, and which might lie on 
the hands of the booksellers, to the great loss of an useful 
body of men. Whether the books so charitably circulated 
were ever as charitably read is more than I know. Possibly 
several of them have been exported to France, and, like goods 
not in request here, may with you have found a market. I 
have heard much talk of the lights to be drawn from books 
that are sent from hence. What improvements they have had 
in their passage (as it is said some liquors are meliorated by 
crossing the sea) I cannot tell; but I never heard a man of 
common judgment or the least degree of information speak 
a word in praise of the greater part of the publications cir- 
culated by that society; nor have their proceedings been 
accounted, except by some of themselves, as of any serious 
consequence. 

Your National Assembly seems to entertain much the 
same opinion that I do of this poor charitable club. Asa 
nation, you reserved the whole stock of your eloquent ac- 
knowledgments for the Revolution Society, when their 
fellows in the Constitutional were in equity entitled to some 
share. Since you have selected the Revolution Society as 
the great object of your national thanks and praises, you 
will think me excusable in making its late conduct the sub- 
ject of my observations. The National Assembly of France 
has given importance to these gentlemen by adopting them ; 
and they return the favour by acting as a committee in Eng- 
land for extending the principles of the National Assembly. 
Henceforward we must consider them as a kind of privileged 


356 BURKE 


persons, as no inconsiderable members in the diplomatic 
body. This is one among the revolutions which have given 
splendour to obscurity and distinction to undiscerned merit. 
Until very lately Ido not recollect to have heard of this club. 
Iam quite sure that it never occupied a moment of my 
thoughts,—nor, I believe, those of any person out of their 
own set. I find, upon inquiry, that, on the anniversary of 
the Revolution in 1688, a club of Dissenters, but of what 
denomination I know not, have long had the custom of hear- 
ing a sermon in one of their churches, and that afterwards 
they spent the day cheerfully, as other clubs do, at the 
tavern. But I never heard that any public measure or poli- 
tical system, much less that the merits of the constitution of 
any foreign nation, had been the subject of a formal proceed- 
ing at their festivals, until,to my inexpressible surprise, I 
found them in a sort of public capacity, by a congratulatory 
address, giving an authoritative sanction to the proceedings 
of the National Assembly in France. 

In the ancient principles and conduct of the club, so far at 
least as they were declared, I see nothing to which I could 
take exception. I think it very probable, that, for some 
purpose, new members may have entered among them,—and 
that some truly Christian politicians, who love to dispense 
benefits, but are careful to conceal the hand which distributes 
the dole, may have made them the instruments of their pious 
designs. Whatever 1 may have reason to suspect concern- 
ing private management, I shall speak of nothing as of a cer- 
tainty but what is public. 

For one, I should be sorry to be thought directly or in- 
directly concerned in their proceedings. I certainly take 
my full share, along with the rest of the world, in my indi- 
vidual and private capacity, in speculating on what has been 
done, or is doing, on the public stage, in any place, ancient 
or modern,—in the republic of Rome, or the republic of 
Paris; but having no general apostolical mission, being a 
citizen of a particular state, and being bound up, in a con- 
siderable degree, by its public will, I should think it at least 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 357 


improper and irregular for me to open a formal public cor- 
respondence with the actual government of a foreign nation, 
without the express authority of the government under 
which I live. 

I should be still more unwilling to enter into that corre- 
spondence under anything like an equivocal description, 
which to many, unacquainted with our usages, might make 
the address in which I joined appear as the act of persons in 
some sort of corporate capacity, acknowledged by the laws 
of this kingdom, and authorized to speak the sense of some 
part of it. On account of the ambiguity and uncertainty of 
unauthorized general descriptions, and of the deceit which 
may be practised under them, and not from mere formality, 
the House of Commons would reject the most sneaking peti- 
tion for the most trifling object, under that mode of signa- 
ture to which you have thrown open the folding-doors of 
your presence-chamber, and have ushered into your National 
Assembly with as much ceremony and parade, and with as 
great a bustle of applause, as if you had been visited by the 
whole representative majesty of the whole English nation. If 
what this society has thought proper to send forth had been 
a piece of argument, it would have signified little whose 
argument it was. It would be neither the more nor the less 
convincing on account of the party it came from. But this 
is only a vote andresolution. It stands solely on authority ; 
and in this case it is the mere authority of individuals, few of 
whom appear. Their signatures ought, in my opinion, to 
have been annexed to their instrument. The world would 
then have the means of knowing how many they are, who 
they are, and of what value their opinions may be, from their 
personal abilities, from their knowledge, their experience, or 
their lead and authority in this state. To me, who am but 
a plain man, the proceeding looks a little too refined and too 
ingenious; it has too much the air of a political stratagem, 
adopted for the sake of giving, under a high-sounding name, 
an importance to the public declarations of this club, which, 
when the matter came to be closely inspected, they did not 


358 BURKE 


altogether so well deserve. It isa policy that has very much 
the complexion of a fraud. 

I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty 
as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he will; 
and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attachment 
to that cause, in the whole course of my public conduct. I 
think I envy liberty as little as they do to any other nation. 
But I can not stand forward, and give praise or blame to any- 
thing which relates to human actions and human concerns 
on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped of every 
relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical 
abstraction. Circumstances (which with some gentlemen 
pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle 
its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect. The cir- 
cumstances are what render every civil and political scheme 
beneficial or noxious to mankind. Abstractedly speaking, 
government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could I, in com- 
mon sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on her 
enjoyment of a government (for she then had a government), 
without inquiry what the nature of that government was, or 
how it was administered? Can I now congratulate the same 
nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in the ab- 
stract may be classed amongst the blessings of mankind, 
that I am seriously to felicitate a madman who has escaped 
from the protecting restraint and wholesome darkness of his 
cell on his restoration to the enjoyment of light and liberty? 
Am I to congratulate a highwayman and murderer who has 
broken prison upon the recovery of his natural rights ? This 
would be to act over again the scene of the criminals con- 
demned to the galleys, and their heroic deliverer, the meta- 
physic Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. 

When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong 
principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly 
know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke 
loose; but we ought to suspend our judgment until the 
first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, 
and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 359 


troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, be- 
fore I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, 
that they have really received one. Flattery corrupts both 
the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more 
service to the people than to kings. I should therefore 
suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, 
until I was informed how it had been combined with govern- 
ment, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of 
armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed 
revenue, with morality and religion, with solidity and prop- 
erty, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. 
All these (in their way) are good things, too; and without 
them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely 
to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that 
they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will 
please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which 
may be soon turned into complaints. Prudence would 
dictate this in the case of separate, insulated, private men. 
But liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate 
people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use 
which is made of power,—and particularly of so trying a 
thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, 
tempers, and dispositions, they have little or no experience, 
and in situations where those who appear the most stirring 
in the scene may possibly not be the real movers. 

All these considerations, however, were below the tran- 
scendental dignity of the Revolution Society. Whilst I 
continued in the country, from whence I had the honour of 
writing to you, I had but an imperfect idea of their transac- 
tions. On my coming to town, I sent for an account of 
their proceedings, which had been published by their au- 
thority, containing a sermon of Dr. Price, with the Duke de 
Rochefoucault’s and the Archbishop of Aix’s letter and 
several other documents annexed. The whole of that pub- 
lication, with the manifest design of connecting the affairs of 
France with those of England, by drawing us into an imitation 
of the conduct of the National Assembly, gave me a consider- 


360 _ BURKE 


able degree of uneasiness. The effect of that conduct 
upon the power, credit, prosperity, and tranquillity of France 
became every day more evident. The form of constitution 
to be settled, for its future polity, became more clear. We 
are now in a condition to discern with tolerable exactness 
the true nature of the object held upto ourimitation. Ifthe 
prudence of reserve and decorum dictates silence in some 
circumstances, in others prudence of a higher order. may 
justify us in speaking our thoughts. The beginnings of 
confusion with us in England are at present feeble enough ; 
but with you we have seen an infancy still more feeble 
growing by momentsinto a strength to heap mountains upon 
mountains, and to wage war with Heaven itself. When- 
ever our neighbour's house is on fire, it can not be amiss for 
the engines to play a little on ourown. Better to be de- 
spised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too 
confident a security. 

Solicitous chiefly for the peace of my own country, but 
by no means unconcerned for yours, I wish to communicate 
more largely what was at first intended only for your pri- 
vate satisfaction. I shall still keep your affairs in my eye, and 
continue to address myself to you. Indulging myself in the 
freedom of epistolary intercourse, I beg leave to throw out 
my thoughts and express my feelings just as they arise in 
my mind, with very little attention to formal method. I set 
out with the proceedings of the Revolution Society ; but I 
shall not confine myself to them. Is it possible I should? 
It looks to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of the affairs 
of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than 
Europe. All circumstances taken together, the French 
Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto hap- 
pened in the world. The most wonderful things are brought 
about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridic- 
ulous, in the most ridiculous modes, and apparently by the 
most contemptible instruments. Everything seems out of 
nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all 
sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies. In 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 361 


viewing this monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite 
passions necessarily succeed and sometimes mix with each 
other in the mind: alternate contempt and indignation, alter- 
nate laughter and tears, alternate scorn and horror. 

It cannot, however, be denied that to some this strange 
scene appeared in quite another point of view. Into them 
it inspired no other sentiments than those of exultation and 
rapture. They saw nothing in what has been done in France 
but a firm and temperate exertion of freedom,—so consis- 
tent, on the whole, with morals and with piety as to make it 
deserving not only of the secular applause of dashing Mach- 
iavelian politicians, but to render it a fit theme for all the 
devout effusions of sacred eloquence, 


On the forenoon of the fourth of November last, Doctor 
Richard Price, a Non-Conforming minister of eminence, 
preached at the Dissenting meeting-house of the Old Jewry, 
to his club or society, a very extraordinary miscellaneous 
sermon, in which there are some good moral and religious 
sentiments, and not ill expressed, mixed up with a sort of 
porridge of various political opinions and reflections; but 
the Revolution in France is the grand ingredient in the 
caldron. I consider the address transmitted by the Revolu- 
tion Society to the National Assembly, through Earl Stan- 
hope, as originating in the principles of the sermon, and as 
a corollary from them. It was moved by the preacher of 
that discourse. It was passed by those who came reeking 
from the effect of the sermon, without any censure or quali- 
fication, expressed or implied. If, however, any of the 
gentlemen concerned shall wish to separate the sermon from 
the resolution, they know how to acknowledge the one and 
to disavow the other. They may doit: I can not. 

For my part, I looked on that sermon as the public dec- 
laration of a man much connected with literary caballers 
and intriguing philosophers, with political theologians and 
theological politicians, both at home and abroad. I know 
they set him up asa sort of oracle; because, with the best 


362 BURKE 


intentions in the world, he naturally philippizes, and chants 
his prophetic song in exact unison with their designs. 

That sermon is in a strain which I believe has not been 
heard in this kingdom, in any of the pulpits which are toler- 
ated or encouraged in it, since the year 1648,—when a pre- 
decessor of Dr. Price, the Reverend Hugh Peters, made the 
vault of the king’s own chapel at St. James’s ring with the 
honour and privilege of the saints, who, with the “ high praises 
of God in their mouths, and a two-edged sword in their 
hands, were to execute judgment on the heathen, and punish- 
ments upon the people; to bind their kings with chains, and 
their nobles with fetters of iron.’”’} Few harangues from 
the pulpit, except in the days of your League in France, or 
in the days of our Solemn League and Covenant in England, 
have ever breathed less of the spirit of moderation than this 
lecture in the Old Jewry. Supposing, however, that some- 
thing like moderation were visible in this political sermon, 
yet politics and the pulpit are terms that have little agree- 
ment. No sound ought to be heard in the church but the 
healing voice of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty 
and civil government gains as little as that of religion by 
this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper char- 
acter to assume what does not belong to them are, for the 
greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and 
of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with 
the world, in which they are so fond of meddling, and inex- 
perienced in all its affairs, on which they pronounce with so 
' much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the pas- 
sions they excite. Surely the church is a place where one 
day’s truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and ani- 
mosities of mankind. 

This pulpit style, revived after so long a discontinuance, 
had to me the air of novelty, and of a novelty not wholly 
without danger. I do not charge this danger equally to 
every part of the discourse. The hint given to a noble and 
reverend lay-divine, who is supposed high in office in 
one of our universities,2 and other lay-divines “of rank 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 363 


and literature,” may be proper and seasonable, though 
somewhat new. If the noble Seekers should find noth- 
ing to satisfy their pious fancies in the old staple of the 
national Church, or in all the rich variety to be found in the 
well-assorted warehouses of the Dissenting congregations, 
Dr. Price advises them to improve upon Non-Conformity, 
and to set up, each of them, a separate meeting-house upon 
his own particular principles.’ It is somewhat remarkable 
that this reverend divine should be so earnest for setting up 
new churches, and so perfectly indifferent concerning the 
doctrine which may be taught in them. His zeal is of a 
curious character. It is not for the propagation of his own 
opinions, but of any opinions. It is not for the diffusion of 
truth, but for the spreading of contradiction. Let the noble 
teachers but dissent, it is no matter from whom or from what. 
This great point once secured, it is taken for granted their 
religion will be rational and manly. I doubt whether relig- 
ion would reap all the benefits which the calculating divine 
computes from this ‘great company of great preachers.” 
It would certainly be a valuable addition of nondescripts to 
the ample collection of known classes, genera, and species, 
which at present beautify the hortus siccus of Dissent. A 
sermon from a noble duke, or a noble marquis, or a noble 
earl, or baron bold, would certainly increase and diversify 
the amusements of this town, which begins to grow satiated 
with the uniform round of its vapid dissipations. I should 
only stipulate that these new Mess-Johns in robes and cor- 
onets should keep some sort of bounds in the democratic 
and levelling principles which are expected from their titled 
pulpits. The new evangelists will, I dare say, disappoint 
the hopes that are conceived of them. They will not be- 
come, literally as well as figuratively, polemic divines,—nor 
be disposed so to drill their congregations, that they may, 
as in former blessed times, preach their doctrines to regi- 
ments of dragoons and corps of infantry and artillery. Such 
arrangements, however favourable to the cause of compulsory 
freedom, civil and religious, may not be equally conducive 


364 BURKE 


to the national tranquillity. These few restrictions I hope 
are no great stretches of intolerance, no very violent exer- 
tions of despotism. 

But I may say of our preacher, ‘“‘ Utinam nugis tota illa 
dedisset tempora sevitiz.’’ All things in this his fulminating 
bull are not of so innoxious atendency. His doctrines af- 
fect our Constitution in its vital parts. He tells the Revolu- 
tion Society, in this political sermon, that his Majesty “ is 
almost the only lawful king in the world, because the only 
one who owes his crown to the choice of his people.” Asto 
the kings of the world, all of whom (except one) this arch-pon- 
tiff of the rights of men, with all the plenitude and with 
more than the boldness of the Papal deposing power in its 
meridian fervour of the twelfth century, puts into one sweep- 
ing clause of ban and anathema, and proclaims usurpers by 
circles of longitude and latitude over the whole globe, it be- 
hooves them to consider how they admit into their territo- 
ries these apostolic missionaries, who are to tell their sub- 
jects they are not lawful kings. That is their concern. It 
is ours, as a domestic interest of some moment, seriously to 
consider the solidity of the only principle upon which these 
gentlemen acknowledge a king of Great Britain to be enti- 
tled to their allegiance. 

This doctrine, as applied to the prince now on the British 
throne, either is nonsense, and therefore neither true nor 
false, or it affirms a most unfounded, dangerous, illegal, and 
unconstitutional position. According to this spiritual doc- 
tor of politics, if his Majesty does not owe his crown to the 
choice of his people, he is no lawful king. Now nothing 
can be more untrue than that the crown of this kingdom is 
so held by his Majesty. Therefore, if you follow their rule, 
the king of Great Britain, who most certainly does not owe 
his high office to any form of popular election, is in no re- 
spect better than the rest of the gang of usurpers, who reign, 
or rather rob, all over the face of this our miserable world, 
without any sort of right or title to the allegiance of their 
people. The policy of this general doctrine, so qualified, is 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 365 


evident enough. The propagators of this political gospel 
are in hopes their abstract principle (their principle that a 
popular choice is necessary to the legal existence of the 
sovereign magistracy) would be overlooked, whilst the king 
of Great Britain was not affected by it.. In the mean time 
the ears of their congregations would be gradually habitu- 
ated to it, as if it were a first principle admitted without dis- 
pute. For the present it would only operate as a theory, 
pickled in the preserving juices of pulpit eloquence, and 
laid by for future use. Condo et compono quz mox de- 
promere possim. By this policy, whilst our government is 
soothed with a reservation in its favour, to which it has no 
claim, the security which it has in common with all govern- 
ments, so far as opinion is security, is taken away. 

Thus these politicians proceed, whilst little notice is taken 
of their doctrines ; but when they come to be examined 
upon the plain meaning of their words and the direct ten- 
dency of their doctrines, then equivocations and slippery 
constructions come into play. When they say the king 
owes his crown to the choice of his people, and is therefore 
the only lawful sovereign in the world, they will perhaps tell 
us they mean to say no more than that some of the king’s pre- 
decessors have been called to the throne by some sort of 
choice, and therefore he owes his crown to the choice of his 
people. Thus, by a miserable subterfuge, they hope to ren- 
der their proposition safe by rendering it nugatory. They 
are welcome to the asylum they seek for their offence, since 
they take refuge in their folly. For, if you admit this inter- 
pretation, how does their idea of election differ from our 
idea of inheritance? And how does the settlement of the 
crown in the Brunswick line, derived from James the First, 
come to legalize our monarchy rather than that of any of 
the neighbouring countries? At some time or other, to be 
sure, all the beginners of dynasties were chosen by those 
who called them to govern. There is ground enough for 
the opinion that all the kingdoms of Europe were at a re- 
mote period elective, with more or fewer limitations in the 


366 BURKE 


objects of choice. But whatever kings might have been here 
or elsewhere a thousand years ago, or in whatever manner 
theruling dynasties of England or France may have begun, 
the king of Great Britain is at this day king by a fixed rule 
of succession, according to the laws of his country ; and 
whilst the legal conditions of the compact of sovereignty are 
performed by him (as they are performed), he holds his 
crown in contempt of the choice of the Revolution Society, 
who have not a single vote for a king amongst them, either 
individually or collectively : though I make no doubt they 
would soon erect themselves into an electoral college, if 
things were ripe to give effect totheirclaim. His Majesty’s 
heirs and successors, each in his time and order, will come to 
the crown with the same contempt of their choice with which 
his Majesty has succeeded to that he wears. 

Whatever may be the success of evasion in explaining 
away the gross error of fact, which supposes that his Majesty 
(though he holds it in concurrence with the wishes) owes his 
crown to the choice of his people, yet nothing can evade 
their full, explicit declaration concerning the principle of a 
right in the people to choose,—which right is directly main- 
tained, and tenaciously adhered to. All the oblique insin- 
uations concerning election bottom in this proposition, and 
are referable to it. Lest the foundation of the king’s exclu- 
sive legal title should pass for a mere rant of adulatory free- 
dom, the political divine proceeds dogmatically to assert,* 
that, by the principles of the Revolution, the people of Eng- 
land have acquired three fundamental rights, all of which, 
with him, compose one system, and lie together in one short 
sentence: namely, that we have acquired a right 

1. “ To choose our own governors,” 

2. ‘“ To cashier them for misconduct.” 

3. “To frame a government for ourselves.” 

This new and hitherto unheard-of bill of rights, though made 
in the name of the whole people, belongs to those gentle- 
men and their faction only. The body of the people of 
England have no share in it. They utterly disclaim it. 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 367 


They will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives 
and fortunes. They are bound to do so by the laws of their 
country, made at the time of that very Revolution which is 
appealed to in favour of the fictitious rights claimed by the 
society which abuses its name. 

These gentlemen of the Old Jewry, in all their reasonings 
on the Revolution of 1688, have a revolution which hap- 
pened in England about forty years before, and the late 
French Revolution, so much before their eyes and in their 
hearts, that they are constantly confounding all the three 
together. It is necessary that we should separate what they 
confound. We must recall their erring fancies to the acts 
of the Revolution which we revere, for the discovery of its 
true principles. If the principles of the Revolution of 1688 
are anywhere to be found, it is in the statute called the Dec- 
laration of Right. In that most wise, sober, and consider- 
ate declaration, drawn up by great lawyers and great 
statesmen, and not by warm and inexperienced enthusiasts, 
not one word is said, nor one suggestion made, of a general 
right “to choose our own governors, to cashier them for 
misconduct, and to form a government for ourselves.” 

This Declaration of Right (the act of the 1st of William 
and Mary, sess. 2, ch. 2) is the corner-stone of our Constitu- 
tion, as reinforced, explained, improved, and in its funda- 
mental principles forever settled. It is called “An act for 
declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for set- 
tling the succession of the crown.” You will observe that 
these rights and this succession are declared in one body, 
and bound indissolubly together. 

A few years after this period, a second opportunity offered 
for asserting a right of election to the crown. On the pros- 
pect of a total failure of issue from King William, and from 
the princess, afterwards Queen Anne, the consideration of 
the settlement of the crown, and of a further security for the 
liberties of the people, again came before the legislature. 
Did they this second time make any provision for legalising 
the crown on the spurious Revolution principles of the Old 


368 BURKE 


Jewry ? No. They followed the principles which prevailed 
in the Declaration of Right; indicating with more precision 
the persons who were to inherit in the Protestant line. This 
act also incorporated, by the same policy, our liberties and an 
hereditary succession in the same act. Instead of a right to 
choose our own governors, they declared that the succession 
in that line (the Protestant line drawn from James the First) 
was absolutely necessary “for the peace, quiet, and security 
of the realm,” and that it was equally urgent on them “to 
maintain a certainty in the succession thereof, to which the 
subjects may safely have recourse for their protection.” 
Both these acts, in which are heard the unerring, unambig- 
uous oracles of Revolution policy, instead of countenancing 
the delusive gypsy predictions of a “right to choose our 
governors,” prove to a demonstration how totally adverse 
the wisdom of the nation was from turning a case of ne- 
cessity into a rule of law. 

Unquestionably there was at the Revolution, in the person 
of King William, a small and a temporary deviation from 
the strict order of a regular hereditary succession ; but it is 
against all genuine principles of jurisprudence to draw a 
principle from a law made in a special case and regarding an 
individual person. Privilegium non transit in exemplum. 
If ever there was a time favourable for establishing the prin- 
ciple that a king of popular choice was the only legal king, 
without all doubt it was at the Revolution. Its not being 
done at that time is a proof that the nation was of opinion it 
ought not to be done at any time. There is no person so 
completely ignorant of our history as not to know that the 
majority in Parliament, of both parties, were so little dis- 
posed to anything resembling that principle, that at first 
they were determined to place the vacant crown, not on the 
head of the Prince of Orange, but on that of his wife, Mary, 
daughter of King James, the eldest born of the issue of that 
king, which they acknowledged as undoubtedly his. It 
would be to repeat a very trite story, to recall to your mem- 
ory all those circumstances which demonstrated that their 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 369 


accepting King William was not properly a choice; but to 
all those who did not wish in effect to recall King James, 
or to deluge their country in blood, and again to bring their 
religion, laws, and liberties into the peril they had just es- 
caped, it was an act of necessity, in the strictest moral sense 
in which necessity can be taken. 

In the very act in which, for a time, and in a single case, 
Parliament departed from the strict order of inheritance, in 
favour of a prince who, though not next, was, however, very 
near in the line of succession, it is curious to observe how 
Lord Somers, who drew the bill called the Declaration of 
Right, has comported himself on that delicate occasion. It 
is curious to observe with what address this temporary solu- 
tion of continuity is kept from the eye; whilst all that 
could be found in this act of necessity to countenance the 
idea of an hereditary succession is brought forward, and 
fostered, and made the most of, by this great man, and by 
the legislature who followed him. Quitting the dry, imper- 
ative style of an act of Parliament, he makes the Lords and 
Commons fall to a pious legislative ejaculation, and declare 
that they consider it “as a marvellous providence, and 
merciful goodness of God to this nation, to preserve their 
said Majesties’ royal persons most happily to reign over us 
on the throne of their ancestors, for which, from the bottom 
of their hearts, they return their humblest thanks and 
praises.” The legislature plainly had in view the Act of 
Recognition of the first of Queen Elizabeth, chap. 3d, and 
of that of James the First, chap. Ist, both acts strongly de- 
claratory of the inheritable nature of the crown; and in 
many parts they follow, with a nearly literal precision, the 
words, and even the form of thanksgiving which is found in 
these old declaratory statutes. 

The two Houses, in the act of King William, did not 
thank God that they had found a fair opportunity to assert 
a right to choose their own governors, much less to make an 
election the only lawful title to the crown. Their having 
been in a condition to avoid the very appearance of it, as 

24 


370 BURKE 


much as possible, was by them considered as a providential 
escape. They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over every 
circumstance tending to weaken the rights which in the 
meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate, or 
which might furnish a precedent for any future departure 
from what they had then settled forever. Accordingly, that 
they might not relax the nerves of their monarchy, and that 
they might preserve a close conformity to the practice of 
their ancestors, as it appeared in the declaratory statutes of 
Queen Mary ® and Queen Elizabeth, in the next clause they 
vest, by recognition, in their Majesties all the legal prero- 
gatives of the crown, declaring “that in them they are most 
fully, rightfully, and entirely invested, incorporated, united, 
and annexed.” In the clause which follows, for preventing 
questions, by reason of any pretended titles to the crown, 
they declare (observing also in this the traditionary language, 
along with the traditionary policy of the nation, and repeat- 
ing as from a rubric the language of the preceding acts of 
Elizabeth and James) that on the preserving “a certainty in 
the succession thereof the unity, peace, and tranquillity of 
this nation doth, under God, wholly depend.” 

They knew that a doubtful title of succession would but too 
much resemble an election, and that an election would be 
utterly destructive of the “unity, peace, and tranquillity of 
this nation,’ which they thought to be considerations of 
some moment. To provide for these objects, and therefore 
to exclude forever the Old Jewry doctrine of “a right to 
choose our own governors,” they follow with a clause con- 
taining a most solemn pledge, taken from the preceding act 
of Queen Elizabeth,—as solemn a pledge as ever was or can 
be given in favour of an hereditary succession, and as solemn 
a renunciation as could be made of the principles by this 
society imputed to them :—“ The Lords Spiritual and Tem- 
poral, and Commons, do, in the name of all the people 
aforesaid, most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, 
their heirs, and posterities forever; and do faithfully prom- 
ise that they will stand to, maintain, and defend their said 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 371 


Majesties, and also the limitation of the crown, herein speci- 
fied and contained, to the utmost of their powers,” etc., etc. 

So faris it from being true that we acquired a right by 
the Revolution to elect our kings, that, if we had possessed 
it before, the English nation did at that time most solemnly 
renounce and abdicate it, for themselves, and for all their 
posterity forever. These gentlemen may value themselves 
as much as they please on their Whig principles; but I never 
desire to be thought a better Whig than Lord Somers, or to 
understand the principles of the Revolution better than 
those by whom it was brought about, or to read in the Dec- 
laration of Right any mysteries: unknown to those whose 
penetrating style has engraved in our ordinances, and in our 
hearts, the words and spirit of that immortal law. 

It is true, that, aided with the powers derived from force 
and opportunity, the nation was at that time, in some sense, 
free to take what course it pleased for filling the throne,— 
but only free to do so upon the same grounds on which they 
might have wholly abolished their monarchy, and every 
other part of their Constitution. However, they did not 
think such bold changes within their commission. It is, in- 
deed, difficult, perhaps impossible, to give limits to the mere 
abstract competence of the supreme power, such as was exer- 
cised by Parliament at that time; but the limits of a moral 
competence, subjecting even in powers more indisputably 
sovereign, occasional will to permanent reason, and to the 
steady maxims of faith, justice, and fixed fundamental policy, 
are perfectly intelligible, and perfectly binding upon those 
who exercise any authority, under any name, or under any 
title, in the state. The House of Lords, for instance, is not 
morally competent to dissolve the House of Commons,—no, 
nor even to dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would, its 
portion in the legislature of the kingdom. Though a king 
may abdicate for his own person, he can not abdicate for the 
monarchy. By asstrong, or by a stronger reason, the House 
of Commons can not renounce its share of authority. The 
engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the 


372 BURKE 


name of the Constitution, forbids such invasion and such 
surrender. The constituent parts of a state are obliged to 
hold their public faith with each other, and with all those 
who derive any serious interest under their engagements, as 
much as the whole state is bound to keep its faith with 
separate communities: otherwise, competence and power 
would soon be confounded, and no law be left but the will 
of a prevailing force. On this principle, the succession of the 
crown has always been what it now is, an hereditary succes- 
sion by law: in the old line it was a succession by the Com- 
mon Law; in the new by the statute law, operating on the 
principles of the Common Law, not changing the substance, 
but regulating the mode and describing the persons. But 
these descriptions of law are of the same force, and are de- 
rived from an equal authority, emanating from the common 
agreement and original compact of the state, communi spon- 
sione reipublicz, and as such are equally binding on king, 
and people too, as long as the terms are observed, and they 
continue the same body politic. 

It is far from impossible to reconcile, if we do not suffer 
ourselves to be entangled in the mazes of metaphysic sophis- 
try, the use both of a fixed rule and an occasional deviation, 
—the sacredness of an hereditary principle of succession in 
our government with a power of change in its application in 
cases of extreme emergency. Even inthat extremity, (if we 
take the measure of our rights by our exercise of them at the 
Revolution,) the change is to be confined to the peccant part 
only,—to the part which produced the necessary deviation ; 
and even then it is to be effected without a decomposition 
of the whole civil and political mass, for the purpose of 
originating a new civil order out of the first elements of 
society. 

A state without the means of some change is without the 
means of its conservation. Without such means it might 
even risk the loss of that part of the Constitution which it 
wished the most religiously to preserve. The two principles 
of conservation and correction operated strongly at the two 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 373 


critical periods of the Restoration and Revolution, when 
England found itself without a king. At both those periods 
the nation had lost the bond of union in their ancient 
edifice: they did not, however, dissolve the whole fabric. 
On the contrary, in both cases they regenerated the deficient 
part of the old Constitution through the parts which were 
not impaired. They kept these old parts exactly as they 
were, that the part recovered might be suited to them. 
They acted by the ancient organized states in the shape of 
their old organization, and not by the organic molecule of 
a disbanded people. At no time, perhaps, did the sovereign 
legislature manifest a more tender regard to that fundamental 
principle of British constitutional policy than at the time of 
the Revolution, when it deviated from the direct line of he- 
reditary succession. The crown was carried somewhat out 
of the line in which it had before moved; but the new line 
was derived from the same stock. It was still a line of he- 
reditary descent; still an hereditary descent in the same 
blood, though an hereditary descent qualified with Protestant- 
ism. When the legislature altered the direction, but kept 
the principle, they showed that they held it inviolable. 

On this principle, the law of inheritance had admitted 
some amendment in the old time, and long before the era of 
the Revolution. Some time after the Conquest great 
questions arose upon the legal principles of hereditary de- 
scent. It became a matter of doubt whether the heir per 
capita or the heir per stirpes was to succeed; but whether 
the heir per capita gave way when the heirdom per stirpes 
took place, or the Catholic heir when the Protestant was 
preferred, the inheritable principle survived with a sort of 
immortality through all transmigrations,— 


Multosque per annos 
Stat fortuna domus, et avi numerantur avorum. 


This is the spirit of our Constitution, not only in its settled 
course, but in all its revolutions. Whoever came in, or how- 
ever he came in, whether he obtained the crown by law or by 


374 BURKE 


force, the hereditary succession was either continued or 
adopted. 

The gentlemen of the Society for Revolutions see nothing 
in that of 1688 but the deviation from the Constitution ; 
and they take the deviation from the principle for the prin- 
ciple. They have little regard to the obvious consequences 
of their doctrine, though they may see that it leaves positive 
authority in very few of the positive institutions of this 
country. When such an unwarrantable maxim is once 
established, that no throne is lawful but the elective, no one 
act of the princes who preceded this era of fictitious elec- 
tion can be valid. Do these theorists mean to imitate some 
of their predecessors, who dragged the bodies of our ancient 
sovereigns out of the quiet of their tombs? Do they mean 
to attaint and disable backwards all the kings that have 
reigned before the Revolution, and consequently to stain 
the throne of England with the blot of a continual usurpa- 
tion? Do they mean to invalidate, annul, or to call into 
question, together with the titles of the whole line of our 
kings, that great body of ourstatute law which passed under 
those whom they treat as usurpers? to annul laws of inesti- 
mable value to our liberties,—of as great value at least as 
any which have passed at or since the period of the Revolu- 
tion? If kings who did not owe their crown to the choice 
of their people had no title to make laws, what will become 
of the statute De tallagio non concedendo? of the Petition 
of Right? of the act of Habeas Corpus? Do these new 
doctors of the rights of men presume to assert that King 
James the Second, who came to the crown as next of blood, 
according to the rules of a then unqualified succession, was 
not to all intents and purposes a lawful king of England, 
before he had done any of those acts which were justly con- 
strued into an abdication of his crown? If he was not, 
much trouble in Parliament might have been saved at the 
period these gentlemen commemorate. But King James 
was a bad king with a good title, and not an usurper. The 
princes who succeeded according to the act of Parliament 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 375 


which settled the crown on the Electress Sophia and on her 
descendants, being Protestants, came in as much by a title 
of inheritance as King James did. He came in according 
to the law, as it stood at his accession to the crown; and the 
princes of the House of Brunswick came to the inheritance 
of the crown, not by election, but by the law, as it stood at 
their several accessions, of Protestant descent and inheritance, 
as I hope I have shown sufficiently. 

The law by which this royal family is specifically destined 
to the succession, is the act of the 12th and 13th of King 
William. Theterms of this act bind “us, and our heirs, 
and our posterity, to them, their heirs, and their posterity,” 
being Protestants, to the end of time, in the same words as 
the Declaration of Right had bound us to the heirs of King 
William and Queen Mary. It therefore secures both an 
hereditary crown and an hereditary allegiance. On what 
ground, except the constitutional policy of forming an es- 
tablishment to secure that kind of succession which is to 
preclude a choice of the people forever, could the legislature 
have fastidiously rejected the fair and abundant choice which 
our own country presented to them, and searched in strange 
lands for a foreign princess, from whose womb the line of 
our future rulers were to derive their title to govern millions 
of men through a series of ages? 

The Princess Sophia was named in the act of settlement 
of the 12th and 13th of King William, for a stock and root 
of inheritance to our kings, and not for her merits as a tem- 
porary administratrix of a power which she might not, and 
in fact did not, herself ever exercise. She was adopted for 
one reason and for one only,—because, says the act, “the 
most excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess 
Dowager of Hanover, is daughter of the most excellent 
Princess Elizabeth, late Queen of Bohemia, daughter of our 
late sovereign lord King James the First, of happy memory, 
and is hereby declared to be the next in succession in the 
Protestant line,” etc., etc.; ‘‘and the crown shall continue to 
the heirs of her body, being Protestants.” This limitation 


376 BURKE 


was made by Parliament, that through the Princess Sophia an 
inheritable line not only was to be continued in future, but 
(what they thought very material) that through her it was 
to be connected with the old stock of inheritance in King 
James the First ; in order that the monarchy might preserve 
an unbroken unity through all ages, and might be preserved 
(with safety to our religion) in the old approved mode by 
descent, in which, if our liberties had been once endangered, 
they had often, through all storms and struggles of preroga- 
tive and privilege, been preserved. They did well. No ex- 
perience has taught us that in any other course or method 
than that of an hereditary crown our liberties can be re- 
gularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our hereditary 
right. Anirregular, convulsive movement may be necessary 
to throw off an irregular, convulsive disease. But thecourse 
of succession is the healthy habit of the British Constitu- 
tion. Was it that the legislature wanted, at the act for the 
limitation of the crown in the Hanoverian line, drawn 
through the female descendants of James the First, a due 
sense of the inconveniences of having two or three, or pos- 
sibly more, foreigners in succession to the British throne? 
No !—they had a due sense of the evils which might happen 
from such foreign rule, and more than a due sense of them. 
But a more decisive proof cannot be given of the full con- 
viction of the British nation that the principles of the Rev- 
olution did not authorize them to elect kings at their pleas- 
ure, and without any attention to the ancient fundamental 
principles of our government, than their continuing to adopt 
a plan of hereditary Protestant succession in the old line, 
with all the dangers and all the inconveniences of its being 
a foreign line full before their eyes, and operating with the 
utmost force upon their minds. 

A few years ago I should be ashamed to overload a matter 
so capable of supporting itself by the then unnecessary sup- 
port of any argument; but this seditious, unconstitutional 
doctrine is now publicly taught, avowed, and printed. The 
dislike I feel to revolutions, the signals for which have so 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 377 


often been given from pulpits,—the spirit of change that is 
gone abroad,—the total contempt which prevails with you, 
and may come to prevail with us, of all ancient institutions, 
when set in opposition to a present sense of convenience, or 
to the bent of a present inclination,—all these considerations 
make it not unadvisable, in my opinion, to call back our at- 
tention to the true principles of our own domestic laws, that 
you, my French friend, should begin to know, and that we 
should continue to cherish them. We ought not, on either 
side of the water, to suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by 
the counterfeit wares which some persons, by a double fraud, 
export to you in illicit bottoms, as raw commodities of 
British growth, though wholly alien to our soil, in order 
afterwards to smuggle them back again into this country, 
manufactured after the newest Paris fashion of an improved 
liberty. 

The people of England will not ape the fashions they 
have never tried, nor go back to those which they have 
found mischievous on trial. They look upon the legal he- 
reditary succession of their crown as among their rights, not 
as among their wrongs,—as a benefit, not as a grievance——as 
a security for their liberty, not asa badge of servitude. They 
look on the frame of their commonwealth, such as it stands, 
to be of inestimable value; and they conceive the undis- 
turbed succession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability 
and perpetuity ofall the other members of our Constitution. 

I shall beg leave, before I go any further, to take notice 
of some paltry artifices which the abettors of election as the 
only lawful title to the crown are ready to employ, in order 
to render the support of the just principles of our Constitu- 
tion a task somewhat invidious. These sophisters substitute 
a fictitious cause, and feigned personages, in whose favour 
they suppose you engaged, whenever you defend the in- 
heritable nature of the crown. It is common with them to 
dispute as if they were in a conflict with some of those ex- 
ploded fanatics of slavery who formerly maintained, what I 
believe no creature now maintains, “ that the crown is held 


378 BURKE 


by divine, hereditary, and indefeasible right.” These old 
fanatics of single arbitrary power dogmatised as if hereditary 
royalty was the only lawful government in the world,—just 
as our new fanatics of popular arbitrary power maintain 
that a popular election is the sole lawful source of authority. 
The old prerogative enthusiasts, it is true, did speculate 
foolishly, and perhaps impiously too, as if monarchy had 
more of a divine sanction than any other mode of govern- 
ment,—and as if a right to govern by inheritance were in 
strictness indefeasible in every person who should be found 
in the succession to a throne, and under every circumstance, 
which no civil or political right can be. But an absurd opin- 
ion concerning the king’s hereditary right to the crown does 
not prejudice one that is rational, and bottomed upon solid 
principles of law and policy. If all the absurd theories of 
lawyers and divines were to vitiate the objects in which they 
are conversant, we should have no law and no religion left 
in the world. But an absurd theory on one side of a ques- 
tion forms no justification for alleging a false fact or pro- 
mulgating mischievous maxims on the other. 


The second claim of the Revolution Society is “a right of 
cashiering their governors for misconduct.” Perhaps the 
apprehensions our ancestors entertained of forming such a 
precedent as that “of cashiering for misconduct” was the 
cause that the declaration of the act which implied the abdi- 
cation of King James was, if it had any fault, rather too 
guarded and too circumstantial.® But all this guard, and all 
this accumulation of circumstances, serves to show the spirit 
of caution which predominated in the national councils, in a 
situation in which men irritated by oppression, and elevated 
by a triumph over it, are apt to abandon themselves to 
violent and extreme courses; it shows the anxiety of the 
great men who influenced the conduct of affairs at that great 
event to make the Revolution a parent of settlement, and 
not a nursery of future revolutions. 

No government could stand a moment, if it could be 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 379 


blown down with anything so loose and indefinite as an 
opinion of “ misconduct.” They who led at the Revolution 
grounded their virtual abdication of King James upon no 
such light and uncertain principle. They charged him with 
nothing less than a design, confirmed by a multitude of 
illegal overt acts, to subvert the Protestant Church and State, 
and their fundamental, unquestionable laws and liberties: 
they charged him with having broken the original contract 
between king and people. This was more than misconduct. 
A grave and overruling necessity obliged them to take the 
step they took, and took with infinite reluctance, as under 
that most rigorous of alllaws. Their trust for the future 
preservation of the Constitution was not in future revolu- 
tions. The grand policy of all their regulations was to render 
it almost impracticable for any future sovereign to compel 
the states of the kingdom to have again recourse to those 
violent remedies. They left the crown, what in the eye and 
estimation of law it had ever been, perfectly irresponsible. 
In order to lighten the crown still further, they aggravated 
responsibility on ministers of state. By the statute of the 
first of King William, sess. 2d, called ‘‘ the act for declaring 
the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling the 
succession of the crown,” they enacted that the ministers 
should serve the crown on the terms of that declaration. 
They secured soon after the frequent meetings of Parlia- 
ment, by which the whole government would be under the 
constant inspection and active control of the popular repre- 
sentative and of the magnates of the kingdom. In the next 
great constitutional act, that of the 12th and 13th of King 
William, for the further limitation of the crown, and better 
securing the rights and liberties of the subject, they provided 
“that no pardon under the great seal of England should be 
pleadable to an impeachment by the Commons in Parlia. 
ment.” The rule laid down for government in the Decla- 
ration of Right, the constant inspection of Parliament, the 
practical claim of impeachment, they thought infinitely a 
better security not only for their constitutional liberty, but 


380 BURKE 


against the vices of administration, than the reservation of a 
right so difficult in the practice, so uncertain in the issue, 
and often so mischievous in the consequences, as that ‘“ cash- 
iering their governors.” 

Dr. Price, in this sermon,’ condemns, very properly, the 
practice of gross adulatory addresses to kings. Instead of 
this fulsome style, he proposes that his Majesty should be 
told, on occasions of congratulation, that ‘ he is to consider 
himself as more properly the servant than the sovereign of 
his people.” For acompliment, this new form of address 
does not seem to be very soothing. Those whoare servants 
in name, as well as in effect, do not like to be told of their 
situation, their duty, and their obligations. The slave in 
the old play tells his master, ‘‘ Hac commemoratio est quasi 
exprobratio.” It is not pleasant as compliment; it is not 
wholesome as instruction. After all, if the king were to 
bring himself to echo this new kind of address, to adopt it 
in terms, and even to take the appellation of Servant of the 
People as his royal style, how either he or we should be 
much mended by it I can not imagine. I have seen very 
assuming letters signed, ‘‘ Your most obedient, humble serv- 
ant.” The proudest domination that ever was endured on 
earth took a title of still greater humility than that which 
is now proposed for sovereigns by the Apostle of Liberty. 
Kings and nations were trampled upon by the foot of one 
calling himself ‘“‘ The Servant of Servants” ; and mandates 
for deposing sovereigns were sealed with the signet of ‘“‘ The 
Fisherman.” 

I should have considered all this as no more than a sort 
of flippant, vain discourse, in which, as in an unsavoury fume, 
several persons suffer the spirit of liberty to evaporate, if it 
were not plainly in support of the idea, anda part of the 
scheme, of “ cashiering kings for misconduct.” In that light 
it is worth some observation. 

Kings, in one sense, are undoubtedly the servants of the 
people, because their power has no other rational end than 
that of the general advantage; but it is not true that they 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 381 


are, in the ordinary sense (by our Constitution, at least), 
anything like servants,—the essence of whose situation is to 
obey the commands of some other, and to be removable at 
pleasure. But the king of Great Britain obeys no other 
person; all other persons are individually, and collectively 
too, under him, and owe to him a legal obedience. The 
law, which knows neither to flatter nor to insult, calls this 
high magistrate, not our servant, as this humble divine 
calls him, but “ our sovereign lord the king ”’ ; and we, on our 
parts, have learned to speak only the primitive language of 
the law, and not the confused jargon of their Babylonian 
pulpits. 

As he is not to obey us, but we are to obey the law in 
him, our Constitution has made no sort of provision towards 
rendering him, as a servant, in any degree responsible. Our 
Constitution knows nothing of a magistrate like the Justicia 
of Aragon,—nor of any court legally appointed, nor of any 
process legally settled, for submitting the king to the respon- 
sibility belonging to all servants. In this he is not dis- 
tinguished from the commons and the lords, who, in their 
several public capacities, can never be called to an account 
for their conduct: although the Revolution Society chooses 
to assert, in direct opposition to one of the wisest and most 
beautiful parts of our Constitution, that “a king is no more 
than the first servant of the public, created by it, and respon- 
sible to it.” 

Ill would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved 
their fame for wisdom, if they had found no security for 
their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble in 
its operations and precarious in its tenure,—if they had been 
able to contrive no better remedy against arbitrary power 
than civil confusion. Let these gentlemen state who that 
representative public is to whom they will affirm the king, 
as a servant, to be responsible. It will be then time enough 
for me to produce to them the positive statute law which 
affirms that he is not. 

The ceremony of cashiering kings, of which these gentle- 


382 BURKE 


men talk so much at their ease, can rarely, if ever, be per- 
formed without force. It then becomes a case of war, and 
not of constitution. Laws are commanded to hold their 
tongues amongst arms; and tribunals fall to the ground 
with the peace they are no longer able to uphold. The 
Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war, in the only 
case in which any war, and much more a civil war, can be 
just. “ Jnsta bella quibus NECESSARIA.” The question of 
dethroning, or, if these gentlemen like the phrase better, 
“cashiering kings,” will always be, as it has always been, an 
extraordinary question of state, and wholly out of the law: 
a question (like all other questions of state) of dispositions, 
and of means, and of probable consequences, rather than of 
positive rights. As it was not made for common abuses, so 
it is not to be agitated by common minds. The speculative 
line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end and re- 
sistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily defin- 
able. It is not a single act ora single event which deter- 
mines it. Governments must be abused and deranged in- 
deed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the 
future must be as bad as the experience of the past. When 
things are in that lamentable condition, the nature of the 
disease is to indicate the remedy to those whom Nature has 
qualified to administer in extremities this critical, ambigu- 
ous, bitter potion to a distempered state. Times and occa- 
sions and provocations will teach their own lessons. The 
wise will determine from the gravity of the case; the irri- 
table, from sensibility to oppression ; the high-minded, from 
disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands; 
the brave and bold, from the love of honourable danger ina 
generous cause: but, with or without right, a revolution will 
be the very last resource of the thinking and the good. 

The third head of right asserted by the pulpit of the Old 
Jewry, namely, the “right to form a government for our- 
selves,” has, at least, as little countenance from anything 
done at the Revolution, either in precedent or principle, as 
the two first of their claims. The Revolution was made to 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 383 


preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that 
ancient constitution of government which is our only secu- 
rity for law and liberty. If you are desirous of knowing the 
spirit of our Constitution, and the policy which predomi- 
nated in that great period which has secured it to this hour, 
pray look for both in our histories, in our records, in our 
acts of Parliament and journals of Parliament, and not in 
the sermons of the Old Jewry, and the after-dinner toasts 
of the Revolution Society. In the former you will find 
other ideas and another language. Such a claim is as ill- 
suited to our temper and wishes as it is unsupported by any 
appearance of authority. The very idea of the fabrication 
of anew government is enough to fill us with disgust and 
horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do 
now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our 
forefathers. Upon that body and stock of inheritance we 
have taken care not to inoculate any scion alien to the na- 
ture of the original plant. All the reformations we have 
hitherto made have proceeded upon the principle of reference 
to antiquity; and I hope, nay, I am persuaded, that all 
those which possibly may be made hereafter will be carefully 
formed upon analogical precedent, authority, and example. 

Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Charta. You will 
see that Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our law, and 
indeed all the great men who follow him, to Blackstone,® 
are industrious to prove the pedigree of ourliberties. They 
endeavour to prove that the ancient charter, the Magna Charta 
of King John, was connected with another positive charter 
from Henry the First, and that both the oneand the other 
were nothing more than a reaffirmance of the still more an- 
cient standing law of the kingdom. In the matter of fact, 
for the greater part, these authors appear to be in the right ; 
perhaps not always: but if the lawyers mistake in some parti- 
culars, it proves my position still the more strongly ; because 
it demonstrates the powerful prepossession towards antiquity 
with which the minds of all our lawyers and legislators, and of 
all the people whom they wish to influence, have been al- 


384 BURKE ’ 


ways filled, and the stationary policy of this kingdom in con- 
sidering their most sacred rights and franchises as an inheri- 
tance. 

In the famous law of the 3d of Charles the First, called 
the Petition of Right, the Parliament says to the king, 
“ Your subjects have inherited this freedom”: claiming their 
franchises, not on abstract principles, “as the rights of men,” 
but as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived 
from their forefathers. Selden, and the other profoundly 
learned men who drew this Petition of Right, were as well 
acquainted, at least, with all the general theories concerning 
the “rights of men” as any of the discoursers in our pulpits 
or on your tribune: full as well as Dr. Price, or as the Abbé 
Siéyes. But, for reasons worthy of that practical wisdom 
which superseded their theoretic science, they preferred this 
positive, recorded, hereditary title to all which can be dear 
to the man and the citizen to that vague, speculative right 
which exposed their sure inheritance to be scrambled for and 
torn to pieces by every wild, litigious spirit. 

The same policy pervades all the laws which have since 
been made for the preservation of our liberties. In the Ist 
of William and Mary, in the famous statute called the Dec- 
laration of Right, the two Houses utter not a syllable of “a 
right to frame a government for themselves.” You will see 
that their whole care was to secure the religion, laws, and 
liberties that had been long possessed, and had been lately 
endangered. “ Taking ® into their most serious consideration 
the best means for making such an establishment that their 
religion, laws, and liberties might not be in danger of being 
again subverted,” they auspicate all their proceedings by 
stating as some of those best means, “in the first place,” to 
do “as their ancestors in like cases have usually done for 
vindicating their ancient rights and liberties, to declare” ; — 
and then they pray the king and queen “that it may be de- 
clared and enacted that all and singular the rights and liber- 
ties asserted and declared are the true ancient and indubit- 
able rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom.” 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 385 


You will observe, that, from Magna Charta to the Declara- 
tion of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our 
Constitution to claim and assert our liberties as an entailed in- 
heritance derived tous from our forefathers, and to be trans- 
mitted to our posterity,—as an estate specially belonging to 
the people of this kingdom, without any reference whatever 
to any other more general or prior right. By this means 
our Constitution preserves an unity in so great a diversity of 
its parts. We have an inheritable crown, an inheritable 
peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inheriting 
privileges, franchises and liberties from a long line of ancestors. 

This policy appears to me to be the result of profound 
reflection,—or rather the happy effect of following Nature, 
which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A _ spirit 
of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and 
confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, 
who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides, the 
people of England well know that the idea of inheritance 
furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure prin- 
ciple of transmission, without at all excluding a principle of 
improvement. It leaves acquisition free ; but it secures 
what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a 
state proceeding on these maxims are locked fast asin a 
sort of family settlement, grasped as in a kind of mortmain 
forever. By a constitutional policy working after the pat- 
tern of Nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our govern- 
ment and our privileges, in the same manner in which we 
enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institu- 
tions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, 
are handed down to us, and from us, in the same course and 
order. Our political system is placed in a just correspon- 
dence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with 
the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body com- 
posed of transitory parts,—wherein, by the disposition of a 
stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great mysterious 
incorporation of the human race, the whole, at one time, is 


never old or middle-aged or young, but, in a condition of 
25 


386 BURKE 


unchangeable constancy, moves on through the varied tenor 
of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression. Thus, 
by preserving the method of Nature in the conduct of the 
state, in what we improve we are never wholly new, in what 
we retain we are never wholly obsolete. By adhering in this 
manner and on those principles to our forefathers, we are 
guided, not by the superstition of antiquaries, but by the 
spirit of philosophic analogy. In this choice of inheritance 
we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation 
in blood: binding up the Constitution of our country with 
our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws 
into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable, 
and cherishing with the warmth of all their combined and 
mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sep- 
ulchres, and our altars. 

Through the same plan of a conformity to Nature in our 
artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her unerring 
and powerful instincts to fortify the fallible and feeble con- 
trivances of our reason, we have derived several other, and 
those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the 
light of an inheritance. Always acting as if in the presence 
of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in it- 
self to misrule and excess, is tempered with an awful gravity. 
This idea of a liberal descent inspires us with a sense of ha- 
bitual native dignity, which prevents that upstart insolence 
almost inevitably adhering to and disgracing those who are 
the first acquirers of any distinction. By this. means our 
liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing 
and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating an- 
cestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It 
has its gallery of portraits, its monumental inscriptions, its 
records, evidences, and titles. We procure reverence to our 
civil institutions on the principle upon which Nature teaches 
us to revere individual men: on account of their age, and on 
account of those from whom they are descended. All your 
sophisters can not produce anything better adapted to pre- 
serve a rational and manly freedom than the course that we 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 387 


have pursued, who have chosen our nature rather than 
our speculations, our breasts rather than our inventions, for 
the great conservatories and magazines of our rights and 
privileges. 


You might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, 
and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent 
dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost 
to memory. Your Constitution, it is true, whilst you were 
out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you 
possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the foundations, 
of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired 
those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. 
Your Constitution was suspended before it was perfected; 
but you had the elements of a Constitution very nearly as 
good as could be wished. In your old states you possessed 
that variety of parts corresponding with the various descrip- 
tions of which your community was happily composed; you 
had all that combination and all that opposition of interests, 
you had that action and counteraction, which, in the natural 
and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of 
discordant powers draws out the harmony of the universe. 
These opposed and conflicting interests, which you con- 
sidered as so great a blemish in your old and in our present 
Constitution, interpose a salutary check to all precipitate 
resolutions. They render deliberation a matter, not of 
choice, but of necessity; they make all change a subject of 
compromise, which naturally begets moderation; they pro- 
duce temperaments, preventing the sore evil of harsh, crude, 
unqualified reformations, and rendering all the headlong 
exertions of arbitrary power, in the few or in the many, for- 
ever impracticable. Through that diversity of members and 
interests, general liberty had as many securities as there 
were separate views in the several orders; whilst by press- 
ing down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy, the 
separate parts would have been prevented from warping and 
starting from their allotted places. 


388 BURKE 


You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but 
you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil 
society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, 
because you began by despising everything that belonged to 
you. You set up your trade without a capital. If the last 
generations of your country appeared without much lustre 
in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived 
your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Undera 
pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations 
would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom 
beyond the vulgar practice of the hour; and you would 
have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired. 
Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to 
respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider 
the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born, 
servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789. In 
order to furnish, at the expense of your honour, an excuse 
to your apologists here for several enormities of yours, you 
would not have been content to be represented as a gang of 
Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from the house of bon- 
dage, and therefore to be pardoned for your abuse of the 
liberty to which you were not accustomed, and were ill fitted. 
Would it not, my worthy friend, have been wiser to have 
you thought, what I for one always thought you, a gener- 
ous and gallant nation, long misled to your disadvantage by 
your high and romantic sentiments of fidelity, honour, and 
loyalty ; that events had been unfavourable to you, but that 
you were not enslaved through any illiberal or servile dis- 
position; that, in your most devoted submission, you were 
actuated by a principle of public spirit; and that it was your 
country you worshipped, in the person of your king? Had 
you made it to be understood, that, in the delusion of this 
amiable error, you have gone further than your wise ances- 
tors,—that you were resolved to resume your ancient privi- 
leges, whilst you preserved the spirit of your ancient and 
your recent loyalty and honour; or if, diffident of ourselves, 
and not clearly discerning the almost obliterated Constitu- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 389 


tion of your ancestors, you had looked to your neighbours 
in this land, who had kept alive the ancient principles and 
models of the old common law of Europe, meliorated and 
adapted to its present state,—by following wise examples 
you would have given new examples of wisdom to the world. 
You would have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in 
the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would 
have shamed despotism from the earth, by showing that 
freedom was not only reconcilable, but, as when well dis- 
ciplined, it is, auxiliary to law. You would have had an un- 
oppressive, but a productive revenue. You would have had 
a flourishing commerce to feed it. You would have had a 
free Constitution, a potent monarchy, a disciplined army, a 
reformed and venerated clergy,—a mitigated, but spirited 
nobility, to lead your virtue, not to overlay it; you would 
have had a liberal order of commons, to emulate and to 
recruit that nobility ; you would have had a protected, satis- 
fied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and 
to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in 
all conditions,—in which consists the true moral equality 
of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction which, by in- 
spiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined 
to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to 
aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never 
can remove, and which the order of civil life establishes as 
much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an 
humble state as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition 
more splendid, but not more happy. You had a smooth and 
easy career of felicity and glory laid open to you, beyond 
anything recorded in the history of the world; but you 
have shown that difficulty is good for man. 

Compute your gains ; see what is got by those extravagant 
and presumptuous speculations which have taught your 
leaders to despise all their predecessors, and all their con- 
temporaries, and even to despise themselves, until the mo- 
ment in which they became truly despicable. By following 
those false lights, France has bought undisguised calamities 


390 BURKE 


at a higher price than any nation has purchased the most 
unequivocal blessings. France has bought poverty by crime. 
France has not sacrificed her virtue to her interest ; but she 
has abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her 
virtue. All other nations have begun the fabric of a new 
government, or the reformation of an old, by establishing 
originally, or by enforcing with greater exactness, some rites 
or other of religion. All other people have laid the founda- 
tions of civil freedom in severer manners, and a system of a 
more austere and masculine morality. France, when she let 
loose the reins of regal authority, doubled the license of a 
ferocious dissoluteness in manners, and of an insolent irre- 
ligion in opinions and practices,—and has extended through 
all ranks of life, as if she were communicating some privilege, 
or laying open some secluded benefit, all the unhappy cor- 
ruptions that usually were the disease of wealth and power. 
This is one of the new principles of equality in France. 
France, by the perfidy of her leaders, has utterly disgraced 
the tone of lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and 
disarmed it of its most potent topics. She has sanctified the 
dark, suspicious maxims of tyrannous distrust, and taught 
kings to tremble at (what will hereafter be called) the delu- 
sive plausibilities of moral politicians. Sovereigns will 
consider those who advise them to place an unlimited confi- 
dence in their people as subverters of their thrones,—as 
traitors who aim at their destruction, by leading their easy 
good-nature, under specious pretences, to admit combinations 
of bold and faithless men into a participation of their power. 
This alone (if there were nothing else) is an irreparable 
calamity to you and to mankind. Remember that your 
Parliament of Paris told your king, that, in calling the states 
together, he had nothing to fear but the prodigal excess of 
their zeal in providing for the support of the throne. It is 
right that these men should hide their heads. It is right 
that they should bear their part in the ruin which their 
counsel has brought on their sovereign and their country. 
Such sanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep,—to 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 301 


encourage it rashly to engage in perilous adventures of un- 
tried policy,—to neglect those provisions, preparations, and 
precautions which distinguish benevolence from imbecility, 
and without which no man can answer for the salutary ef- 
fect of any abstract plan of government or of freedom. For 
want of these, they have seen the medicine of the state cor- 
rupted into its poison. They have seen the French rebel 
against a mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage 
and insult than ever any people has been known to rise 
against the most illegal usurper or the most sanguinary ty- 
rant. Their resistance was made to concession ; their revolt 
was from protection; their blow was aimed at a hand hold- 
ing out graces, favours and immunities. 

This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have 
found their punishment in their success. Laws overturned; 
tribunals subverted ; industry without vigour; commerce ex- 
piring ; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished ; 
a church pillaged, and a state not relieved ; civil and military 
anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom ; everything 
human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and 
national bankruptcy the consequence; and, to crown all, the 
paper securities of new, precarious, tottering power, the dis- 
credited paper securities of impoverished fraud and beggared 
rapine, held out as a currency for the support of an empire, 
in lieu of the two great recognized species that represent the 
lasting, conventional credit of mankind, which disappeared 
and hid themselves in the earth from whence they came, 
when the principle of property, whose creatures and repre- 
sentatives they are, was systematically subverted. 

Were all these dreadful things necessary? Were they the 
inevitable results of the desperate struggle of determined 
patriots, compelled to wade through blood and tumult to 
the quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty? No! 
nothing like it. The fresh ruins of France, which shock our 
feelings wherever we can turn oureyes, are not the devasta- 
tion of civil war: they are the sad, but instructive monu- 
ments of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace, 


392 BURKE 


They are the display of inconsiderate and presumptuous, be- 
cause unresisted and irresistible authority. The persons 
who have thus squandered away the precious treasure of 
their crimes, the persons who have made this prodigal and 
wild waste of public evils (the last stake reserved for the 
ultimate ransom of the state), have met in their progress with 
little, or rather with no opposition at all. Their whole march 
was more like a triumphal procession than the progress of a 
war. Their pioneers have gone before them, and demolished 
and laid everything level at their feet. Not one drop of 
their blood have they shed in the cause of the country they 
have ruined. They have made no sacrifices to their projects 
of greater consequence than their shoe-buckles, whilst they 
were imprisoning their king, murdering their fellow-citizens, 
and bathing in tears and plunging in poverty and distress 
thousands of worthy men and worthy families. Their 
cruelty has not even been the base result of fear. It has 
been the effect of their sense of perfect safety, in authorizing 
treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations, slaughters, and burn- 
ings, throughout their harassed land. But the cause of all 
was plain from the beginning. 

This unforced choice, this fond election of evil, would ap- 
pear perfectly unaccountable, if we did not consider the 
composition of the National Assembly: I do not mean its 
formal constitution, which, as it now stands, is exceptionable 
enough, but the materials of which in a great measure it is 
composed, which is of ten thousand times greater consequence 
than all the formalities in the world. If we were to know 
nothing of this assembly but by its title and function, no 
colours could paint to the imagination anything more vener- 
able. In that light, the mind of an inquirer, subdued by 
such an awful image as that of the virtue and wisdom ofa 
whole people collected into one focus, would pause and 
hesitate in condemning things even of the very worst aspect. 
Instead of blamable, they would appear only mysterious. 
But no name, no power, no function, no artificial institution 
whatsoever, can make the men, of whom any system of 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 393 


authority is composed, any other than God, and Nature, 
and education, and their habits of life have made them. 
Capacities beyond these the people have not to give. Virtue 
and wisdom may be the objects of their choice; but their 
choice confers neither the one nor the other on those upon 
whom they lay their ordaining hands. They have not the 
engagement of Nature, they have not the promise of Revela- 
tion for any such powers. 

After I had read over the list of the persons and descrip- 
tions elected into the Tiers Etat, nothing which they after- 
wards did could appear astonishing. Among them, indeed, 
Isaw some of known rank, some of shining talents; but of 
any practical experience in the state not one man was to be 
found. The best were only men of theory. But whatever 
the distinguished few may have been, it is the substance and 
mass of the body which constitutes its character, and must 
finally determine its direction. In all bodies, those who will 
lead must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must 
conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposi- 
tion of those whom they wish to conduct: therefore, if an 
assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very great part 
of it, nothing but such a supreme degree of virtue as very 
rarely appears in the world, and for that reason can not enter 
into calculation, will prevent the men of talents disseminated 
through it from becoming only the expert instruments of 
absurd projects. If, what is the more likely event, instead 
of that unusual degree of virtue, they should be actuated by 
sinister ambition and a lust of meretricious glory, then 
the feeble part of the assembly, to whom at first they con- 
form, becomes, in its turn, the dupe and instrument of 
their designs. In this political traffic, the leaders will be 
obliged to bow to the ignorance of their followers, and the 
followers to become subservient to the worst designs of their 
leaders. 

To secure any degree of sobriety in the propositions made 
by the leaders in any public assembly, they ought to respect, 
in some degree perhaps to fear, those whom they conduct. 


304 BURKE 


To be led any otherwise than blindly, the followers must be 
qualified, if not for actors, at least for judges; they must 
also be judges of natural weight and authority. Nothing 
can secure a steady and moderate conduct in such assem- 
blies, but that the body of them should be respectably com- 
posed, in point of condition in life, of permanent property, 
of education, and of such habits as enlarge and liberalize the 
understanding. 

In the calling of the States-General of France, the first 
thing that struck me was a great departure from the ancient 
course. I found the representation for the third estate com- 
posed of six hundred persons. They were equal in number 
to the representatives of both the other orders. If the 
orders were to act separately, the number would not, beyond 
the consideration of the expense, be of much moment. But 
when it became apparent that the three orders were to be 
melted down into one, the policy and necessary effect of 
this numerous representation became obvious. A very small 
desertion from either of the other two orders must throw 
the power of both into the hands of the third. In fact, the 
whole power of the state was soon resolved into that body. 
Its due composition became, therefore, of infinitely the 
greater importance. 

Judge, Sir, of my surprise, when I found that a very great 
proportion of the Assembly (a majority, I believe, of the 
members who attended) was composed of practitioners in the 
law. It was composed, not of distinguished magistrates, 
who had given pledges to their country of their science, 
prudence, and integrity,—not of leading advocates, the glory 
of the bar,—not of renowned professors in universities,—but 
for the far greater part, as it must in such a number, of the 
inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely instrumental members 
of the profession. There were distinguished exceptions; 
but the general composition was of obscure provincial advo- 
cates, of stewards of petty local jurisdictions, country at- 
torneys, notaries, and the whole train of the ministers of 
municipal litigation, the fomenters and conductors of the 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 395 


petty war of village vexation. From the moment I read the 
list, 1 saw distinctly, and very nearly as it has happened, all 
that was to follow. 

The degree of estimation in which any profession is held 
becomes the standard of the estimation in which the pro- 
fessors hold themselves. Whatever the personal merits of 
many individual lawyers might have been (and in many it 
was undoubtedly very considerable), in that military king- 
dom no part of the profession had been much regarded, 
except the highest of all, who often united to their profes- 
sional offices great family splendour, and were invested with 
great power and authority. These certainly were highly 
respected, and even with no small degree of awe. The next 
rank was not much esteemed; the mechanical part was in a 
very low degree of repute. 

Whenever the supreme authority is vested in a body so 
composed, it must evidently produce the consequences of 
supreme authority placed in the hands of men not taught 
habitually to respect themselves,—who had no previous for- 
tune in character at stake,—who could not be expected 
to bear with moderation or to conduct with discretion a 
power which they themselves, more than any others, must 
be surprised to find in their hands. Who could flatter him- 
self that these men, suddenly, and as it were by enchantment, 
snatched from the humblest rank of subordination, would 
not be intoxicated with their unprepared greatness? Who 
could conceive that men who are habitually meddling, dar- 
ing, subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and unquiet 
minds, would easily fall back into their old condition of ob- 
scure contention, and laborious, low, and unprofitable chi- 
cane? Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the 
state, of which they understood nothing, they must pursue 
their private interests, which they understood but too well ? 
It was not an event depending on chance or contingency. 
It was inevitable; it was necessary; it was planted in the 
nature of things. They must join (if their capacity did not 
permit them to lead) in any project which could procure to 


306 BURKE 


them a litigious constitution,—which could lay open to them 
those innumerable lucrative jobs which follow in the train 
of all great convulsions and revolutions in the state, and par- 
ticularly in all great and violent permutations of property. 
Was it to be expected that they would attend to the sta- 
bility of property, whose existence had always depended 
upon whatever rendered property questionable, ambiguous, 
and insecure? Their objects would be enlarged with their 
elevation ; but their disposition, and habits, and mode of 
accomplishing their designs must remain the same. 

Well! but these men were to be tempered and restrained 
by other descriptions, of more sober minds and more en- 
larged understandings. Were they, then, to be awed by the 
supereminent authority and awful dignity of a handful of 
country clowns, who have seats in that assembly, some of 
whom are said not to be able to read and write,—and by not 
a greater number of traders, who, though somewhat more 
instructed, and more conspicuous in the order of society, 
had never known anything beyond their counting-house? 
No! both these descriptions were more formed to be over- 
borne and swayed by the intrigues and artifices of lawyers 
than to become their counterpoise. With such a dangerous 
disproportion, the whole must needs be governed by them. 

To the faculty of law was joined a pretty considerable pro- 
portion of the faculty of medicine. This faculty had not, any 
more than that of the law, possessed in France its just estima- 
tion. Its professors, therefore, must have the qualities of 
men not habituated to sentiments of dignity. But supposing 
they had ranked as they ought to do, and as with us they do 
actually, the sides of sick-beds are not the academies for 
forming statesmen and legislators. Then came the dealers 
in stocks and funds, who must be eager, at any expense, to 
change their ideal paper wealth for the more solid substance 
of land. To these were joined men of other descriptions, 
from whom as little knowledge of or attention to the in- 
terests of a great state was to be expected, and as little re- 
gard to the stability of any institution,—men formed to be 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 397 


instruments, not controls.—Such, in general, was the com- 
position of the Tiers Etat in the National Assembly ; in 
which was scarcely to be perceived the slightest traces of 
what we call the natural landed interest of the country. 

We know that the British House of Commons, without 
shutting its doors to any merit in any class, is, by the sure 
operation of adequate causes, filled with everything illus- 
trious in rank, in descent, in hereditary and in acquired opu- 
lence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and 
politic distinction, that the country can afford. But suppos- 
ing, what hardly can be supposed as a case, that the House 
of Commons should be composed in the same manner with 
the Tiers Etat in France,—would this dominion of chicane 
be borne with patience, or even conceived without horror ? 
God forbid I should insinuate anything derogatory to that 
profession which is another priesthood, administering the 
rights of sacred justice! But whilst I revere men in the 
functions which belong to them, and would do as much as one 
man can do to prevent their exclusion from any, I can not, to 
flatter them, give the lieto Nature. They are good and use- 
ful in the composition ; they must be mischievous, if they 
preponderate so as virtually to become the whole. Their 
very excellence in their peculiar functions may be far from 
a qualification for others. It can not escape observation, 
that, when men are too much confined to professional and 
faculty habits, and, as it were, inveterate in the recurrent em- 
ployment of that narrow circle, they are rather disabled than 
qualified for whatever depends on the knowledge of man- 
kind, on experience in mixed affairs, on a comprehensive, 
connected view of the various, complicated, external, and in- 
ternal interests which go to the formation of that multifarious 
thing called a State. 

After all, if the House of Commons were to have an 
wholly professional and faculty composition, what is the 
power of the House of Commons, circumscribed and shut in 
by the immovable barriers of laws, usages, positive rules of 
doctrine and practice, counterpoised by the House of Lords, 


398 BURKE 


and every moment of its existence at the discretion of the 
crown to continue, prorogue, or dissolve us? The power of 
the House of Commons, direct or indirect, is, indeed, great : 
and long may it be able to preserve its greatness, and the 
spirit belonging to true greatness, at the full !—and it will do 
so, as long as it can keep the breakers of lawin India from 
becoming the makers of law for England. The power, how- 
ever, of the House of Commons, when least diminished, is as 
a drop of water in the ocean, compared to that residing in a 
settled majority of your National Assembly. That assembly, 
since the destruction of the orders, has no fundamental law, 
no strict convention, no respected usage to restrain it. In- 
stead of finding themselves obliged to conform to a fixed 
constitution, they have a power to make a constitution which 
shall conform to their designs. Nothing in heaven or upon 
earth can serve as acontrol on them. What ought to be the 
heads, the hearts, the dispositions, that are qualified, or that 
dare, not only to make laws under a fixed constitution, but at 
one heat to strike out a totally new constitution for a great 
kingdom, and in every part of it, from the monarch on the 
throne tothe vestry of a parish? But 


“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” 


In such a state of unbounded power, for undefined and 
undefinable purposes, the evil of a moral and almost physical 
inaptitude of the man to the function must be the greatest 
we can conceive to happen in the management of human 
affairs. 

Having considered the composition of the third estate, as 
it stood in its original frame, I took a view of the representa- 
tives of the clergy. There, too, it appeared that full as little 
regard was had to the general security of property, or to the 
aptitude of the deputies for their public purposes, in the 
principles of their election. That election was so contrived 
as to send a very large proportion of mere country curates 
to the great and arduous work of new-modelling a state; 
men who never had seen the state so much as ina picture; 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 399 


men who knew nothing of the world beyond the bounds of 
an obscure village; who, immersed in hopeless poverty, 
could regard all property, whether secular or ecclesiastical, 
with no other eye than that of envy; among whom must be 
many who, for the smallest hope of the meanest dividend in 
plunder, would readily join in any attempts upon a body of 
wealth in which they could hardly look to have any share, 
except in a general scramble. Instead of balancing the 
power of the active chicaners in the other assembly, these 
curates must necessarily become the active coadjutors, or at 
best the passive instruments, of those by whom they had 
been habitually guided in their petty village concerns. 
They, too, could hardly be the most conscientious of their 
kind, who, presuming upon their incompetent understand- 
ing, could intrigue for a trust which led them from their 
natural relation to their flocks, and their natural spheres of 
action, to undertake the regeneration of kingdoms. This 
preponderating weight, being added to the force of the body 
of chicane in the Tiers Etat, completed that momentum of 
ignorance, rashness, presumption, and lust of plunder, which 
nothing has been able to resist. 

To observing men it must have appeared from the begin- 
ning, that the majority of the third estate, in conjunction 
with such a deputation from the clergy as I have described, 
whilst it pursued the destruction of the nobility, would inev- 
itably become subservient to the worst designs of individ- 
uals in that class. In the spoil and humiliation of their own 
order these individuals would possess a sure fund for the 
pay of their new followers. To squander away the objects 
which made the happiness of their fellows would be to them 
no sacrifice at all. Turbulent, discontented men of quality, 
in proportion as they are puffed up with personal pride and 
arrogance, generally despise their own order. One of the 
first symptoms they discover of a selfish and mischievous 
ambition is a profligate disregard of a dignity which they 
partake with others. To be attached to the subdivision, to 
love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first 


400 BURKE 


principle (the germ, as it were) of public affections. It is 
the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a 
love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that 
portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all 
those who compose it; and as none but bad men would 
justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for 
their own personal advantage. 

There were, in the time of our civil troubles in England, 
(I do not know whether you have any such in your Assem- 
bly in France,) several persons, like the then Earl of Hol- 
land, who by themselves or their families had brought an 
odium on the throne by the prodigal dispensation of its 
bounties towards them, who afterwards joined in the rebel- 
lions arising from the discontents of which they were them- 
selves the cause: men who helped to subvert that throne to 
which they owed, some of them, their existence, others all 
that power which they employed to ruin their benefactor. 
If any bounds are set to the rapacious demands of that sort 
of people, or that others are permitted to partake in the ob- 
jects they would engross, revenge and envy soon fill up the 
craving void that is left in their avarice. Confounded by the 
complication of distempered passions, their reason is dis- 
turbed ; their views become vast and perplexed,—to others 
inexplicable, to themselves uncertain. They find, on all 
sides, bounds to their unprincipled ambition in any fixed 
order of things; but in the fog and haze of confusion all is 
enlarged, and appears without any limit. 

When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an am- 
bition without a distinct object, and work with low instru- 
ments and for low ends, the whole composition becomes low 
and base. Does not something like this now appear in 
France? Does it not produce something ignoble and in- 
glorious: a kind of meanness in all the prevalent policy; a 
tendency in all that is done to lower along with individuals 
all the dignity and importance of the state? Other revolu- 
tions have been conducted by persons who, whilst they at- 
tempted or affected changes in the commonwealth, sanctified 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 401 


their ambition by advancing the dignity of the people whose 
peace they troubled. They had long views. They aimed 
at the rule, not at the destruction of their country. They 
were men of great civil and great military talents, and if the 
terror, the ornament of their age. They were not like Jew 
brokers contending with each other who could best remedy 
with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the wretch- 
edness and ruin brought on their country by their degen- 
erate councils. The compliment made to one of the great 
bad men of the old stamp (Cromwell) by his kinsman, a 
favourite poet of that time, shows what it was he proposed, 
and what indeed to a great degree he accomplished in the 
success of his ambition :— 


“Still as you rise, the state, exalted too, 
Finds no distemper whilst ’t is changed by you: 
Changed like the world’s great scene, when without noise 
The rising sun night’s valeur lights destroys.” 


These disturbers were not so much like men usurping 
power as asserting their natural place in society. Their 
rising was to illuminate and beautify the world. Their con- 
quest over their competitors was by outshining them. The 
hand, that, like a destroying angel, smote the country, com- 
municated to it the force and energy under which it suffered. 
I do not say, (God forbid !) I do not say that the virtues of 
such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes; but 
they were some corrective to their effects. Such was, as I 
said, our Cromwell. Such were your whole race of Guises, 
Condés, and Colignys. Such the Richelieus, who in more 
quiet times acted in the spirit of a civil war. Such, as bet- 
ter men, and in aless dubious cause, were your Henry the 
Fourth, and your Sully, though nursed in civil confusions, 
and not wholly without some of their taint. It is a thing to 
be wondered at, to see how very soon France, when she had 
a moment to respire, recovered and emerged from the longest 
and most dreadful civil war that ever was known in any na- 
tion. Why? Because, among all their massacres, they had 


not slain the mind in their country. A conscious dignity, a 
26 


402 | BURKE 


noble pride, a generous sense of glory and emulation, was 
not extinguished. On the contrary, it was kindled and in- 
flamed. The organs also of the state, however shattered, 
existed. All the prizes of honour and virtue, all the rewards, 
all the distinctions, remained. But your present confusion, 
like a palsy, has attacked the fountain of life itself. Every 
person in your country, in a situation to be actuated bya 
principle of honour, is disgraced and degraded, and can en- 
tertain no sensation of life, except in a mortified and humi- 
liated indignation. But this generation will quickly pass 
away. The next generation of the nobility will resemble 
the artificers and clowns, and money-jobbers, usurers, and 
Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their 
masters. Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level never 
equalize. In all societies consisting of various descriptions 
of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The 
levellers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural or- 
der of things: they load the edifice of society by setting up 
in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be 
on the ground. The associations of tailors and carpenters, 
of which the republic (of Paris, for instance) is composed, 
can not be equal to the situation into which, by the worst of 
usurpations, an usurpation on the prerogatives of Nature, 
you attempt to force them. 

The Chancellor of France, at the opening of the States, 
said, in a tone of oratorial flourish, that all occupations were 
honourable. If he meant only that no honest employment 
was disgraceful, he would not have gone beyond the truth. 
But in asserting that anything is honourable, we imply some 
distinction in its favour. The occupation of a hair-dresser, or 
of a working tallow-chandler, can not be a matter of honour 
to any person,—to say nothing of a number of other more 
servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not 
to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers op- 
pression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, 
are permitted to rule. In this you think you are combat- 
ing prejudice, but you are at war with Nature.) 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 403 


I do not, my dear Sir, conceive you to be of that sophistical, 
captious spirit, or of that uncandid dulness, as to require, for 
every general observation or sentiment, an explicit detail of 
the correctives and exceptions which reason will presume to 
be included in all the general propositions which come from 
reasonable men. You do not imagine that I wish to con- 
fine power, authority, and distinction to blood and names 
and titles. No, Sir. There is no qualification for govern- 
ment but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive. 
Wherever they are actually found, they have, in whatever 
state, condition, profession, or trade, the passport of Heaven 
to human place and honour. Woetothe country which 
would madly and impiously reject the service of the talents 
and virtues, civil, military, or religious, that are given to 
grace and to serve it; and would condemn to obscurity 
everything formed to diffuse lustre and glory around a state! 
Woe to that country, too, that, passing into the opposite 
extreme, considers a low education, a mean, contracted view 
of things, a sordid, mercenary occupation, as a preferable 
title to command! Everything ought to be open,—but not 
indifferently to everyman. No rotation, no appointment by 
lot, no mode of election operating in the spirit of sortition or 
rotation, can be generally good in a government conversant 
in extensive objects; because they have no tendency, direct 
or indirect, to select the man with a view to the duty, or to 
accommodate the one to the other. I do not hesitate to 
say that the road to eminence and power, from obscure 
condition, ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too 
much of course. If rare merit be the rarest of all rare 
things, it ought to pass through some sort of probation. 
The temple of honour ought to be seated on an eminence. 
If it be opened through virtue, let it be remembered, too, 
that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some 
struggle. 

Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state, 
that does not represent its ability, as well as its property. 
But as ability is a vigorous and active principle, and as prop- 


AO4. BURKE 


erty is sluggish, inert, and timid, it never can be safe from 
the invasions of ability, unless it be, out of all proportion, 
predominant in the representation. It must be represented, 
too, in great masses of accumulation, or it is not rightly pro- 
tected. The characteristic essence of property, formed out 
of the combined principles of its acquisition and conserva- 
tion, is to be unequal. The great masses, therefore, which 
excite envy, and tempt rapacity, must be put out of the pos- 
sibility of danger. Then they form a natural rampart about 
the lesser properties in all their gradations. The same 
quantity of property which is by the natural course of things 
divided among many has not the same operation. Its de- 
fensive power is weakened as it is diffused. In this diffusion 
each man’s portion is less than what, in the eagerness of his 
desires, he may flatter himself to obtain by dissipating the 
accumulations of others. The plunder of the few would, 
indeed, give but a share inconceivably small in the distribu- 
tion to the many. But the many are not capable of making 
this calculation; and those who lead them to rapine never 
intend this distribution. 

The power of perpetuating our property in our families is 
one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances be- 
longing to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetua- 
tion of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient 
to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. 
The possessors of family wealth, and of the distinction 
which attends hereditary possession, (as most concerned in 
in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission. With 
us the House of Peers is formed upon this principle. It is 
wholly composed of hereditary property and hereditary dis- 
tinction, and made, therefore, the third of the legislature, 
and, in the last event, the sole judge of all property in all its 
subdivisions. The House of Commons, too, though not 
necessarily, yet in fact, is always so composed, in the far 
greater part. Let those large proprietors be what they will, 
(and they have their chance of being amongst the best,) they 
are, at the very worst, the ballast in the vessel of the com- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 405 


monwealth. For though hereditary wealth, and the rank 
which goes with it, are too much idolised by creeping 
sycophants, and the blind, abject admirers of power, they 
are too rashly slighted in shallow speculations of the petu- 
lant, assuming, short-sighted coxcombs of philosophy. Some 
decent, regulated preéminence, some preference (not exclusive 
appropriation) given to birth, is neither unnatural, nor un- 
just, nor impolitic. 

It is said that twenty-four millions ought to prevail over 
two hundred thousand. True; if the constitution of a king- 
dom be a problem of arithmetic. This sort of discourse does 
well enough with the lamp-post for its second: to men who 
may reason calmly it is ridiculous. The will of the many, 
and their interest, must very often differ; and great will be 
the difference when they make an evil choice. A govern- 
ment of five hundred country attorneys and obscure curates 
is not good for twenty-four millions of men, though it were 
chosen by eight-and-forty millions; nor is it the better for 
being guided by a dozen of persons of quality who have be- 
trayed their trust in order to obtain that power. At present, 
you seem in everything to have strayed out of the high road 
of Nature. The property of France does not govern it. Of 
course property is destroyed, and rational liberty has no 
existence. All you have got for the present is a paper cir- 
culation, and a stock-jobbing constitution: and as to the 
future, do you seriously think that the territory of France, 
upon the republican system of eighty-three independent 
municipalities, (to say nothing of the parts that compose 
them,) can ever be governed as one body, or can ever be set 
in motion by the impulse ofone mind? When the National 
Assembly has completed its work, it will have accomplished 
its ruin. These commonwealths will not long bear a state 
of subjection to the republic of Paris. They will not bear 
that this one body should monopolise the captivity of the 
king, and the dominion over the assembly calling itself 
national. Each will keep its own portion of the spoil 
of the Church to itself; and it will not suffer either 


406 BURKE 


that spoil, or the more just fruits of their industry, or the 
natural produce of their soil, to be sent to swell the insolence 
or pamper the luxury of the mechanics of Paris. In this 
they will see none of the equality, under the pretence of 
which they have been tempted to throw off their allegiance 
to their sovereign, as wellas the ancient constitution of their 
country. There can be no capital city in such a constitution 
as they have lately made. They have forgot, that, when they 
framed democratic governments, they had virtually dismem- 
bered their country. The person whom they persevere in 
calling king has not power left to him by the hundredth part 
sufficient to hold together this collection of republics. The 
republic of Paris will endeavour, indeed, to complete the de- 
bauchery of the army, and illegally to perpetuate the Assem- 
bly, without resort to its constituents, as the means of © 
continuing its despotism. It will make efforts, by becoming 
the heart of aboundless paper circulation, to draw everything 
to itself: but in vain. All this policy in the end will appear 
as feeble as it is now violent. 


If this be your actual situation, compared to the situation 
to which you were called, as it were by the voice of God 
and man, Ican not find it in my heart to congratulate you 
on the choice you have made, or the success which has at- 
tended your endeavours. I can as little recommend to any 
other nation a conduct grounded on such principles and pro- 
ductive of such effects. That I must leave to those who can 
see further into your affairs than I am able to do, and who 
best know how far your actions are favourable to their de- 
sions. The gentlemen of the Revolution Society, who were 
so early in their congratulations, appear to be strongly of 
opinion that there is some scheme of politics relative to this 
country, in which your proceedings may in some way be 
useful. For your Dr, Price, who seems to have speculated 
himself into no small degree of feavour upon this subject, ad- 
dresses his auditors in the following very remarkable words: 
—“ I can not conclude without recalling particularly to your 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 407 


recollection a consideration which I have more than once 
alluded to, and which probably your thoughts have been all 
along anticipating ; a consideration with which my mind is 
impressed more than I can express: I mean the considera- 
tion of the favourableness of the present times to all exertions 
in the cause of liberty.” | 

It is plain that the mind of this political preacher was at 
the time big with some extraordinary design ; and it is very 
probable that the thoughts of his audience, who understood 
him better than I do, did all along run before him in his re- 
flection, and in the whole train of consequences to which it 
led. 

Before I read that sermon, I really thought I had lived in 
a free country; and it was an error I cherished, because it 
gave me a greater liking to the country I lived in. I was, 
indeed, aware that a jealous, ever-waking vigilance, to guard 
the treasure of our liberty, not only from invasion, but from 
decay, and corruption, was our best wisdom and our first 
duty. However, I considered that treasure rather as a pos- 
session to be secured than as a prize to be contended for. 
I did not discern how the present time came to be so very 
favourable to all exertions in the cause of freedom. The 
present time differs from any other only by the circumstance 
of what is doing in France. If the example of that nation 
is to have an influence on this, I can easily conceive why 
some of their proceedings which have an unpleasant aspect, 
and are not quite reconcilableto humanity, generosity, good 
faith, and justice, are palliated with so much milky good- 
nature towards the actors, and borne with so much heroic 
fortitude towards the sufferers. It is certainly not prudent 
to discredit the authority of an example we mean to follow. 
But allowing this, we are led to a very natural question :— 
What is that cause of liberty, and what are those exertions 
in its favour, to which the example of France is so singularly 
auspicious? Is our monarchy to be annihilated, with all the 
laws, all the tribunals, and all the ancient corporations of the 
kingdomr Isevery landmark of the country to bedone away 


408 BURKE 


in favour ofa geometrical and arithmetical constitution? Isthe 
House of Lords to be voted useless ? Is Episcopacy to be 
abolished ? Are the Church lands to be sold to Jews and 
jobbers, or given to bribe new-invented municipal republics 
into a participation in sacrilege? Are all the taxes to be 
voted grievances, and the revenue reduced to a patriotic con- 
tribution or patriotic presents? Are silver shoe-buckles to 
be substituted in the place of the land-tax and the malt-tax, 
for the support of the naval strength of this kingdom? Are 
all orders, ranks, and distinctions to be confounded, that out 
of universal anarchy, joined to national bankruptcy, three or 
four thousand democracies should be formed into eighty- 
three, and that they may all, by some sort of unknown at- 
tractive power, be organized into one? For this great end 
is the army to be seduced from its discipline and its fidelity, 
first by every kind of debauchery, and then by the terrible 
precedent of a donative in the increase of pay? Are the 
curates to be seduced from their bishops by holding out to 
them the delusive hope of a dole out of the spoils of their 
own order? Are the citizens of London to be drawn from 
their allegiance by feeding them at the expense of their 
fellow-subjects? Is a compulsory paper currency to be 
substituted in the place of the legal coin of this kingdom ? 
Is what remains of the plundered stock of public revenue to 
be employed in the wild project of maintaining two armies to 
watch over and to fight with each other? If these are the ends 
and means of the Revolution Society, I admit they are well 
assorted ; and France may furnish them for both with pre- 
cedents in point. 

I see that your example is held out to shame us. I know 
that we are supposed a dull, sluggish race, rendered passive 
by finding our situation tolerable, and prevented by a me- 
diocrity of freedom from ever attaining to its full perfection. 
Your leaders in France began by affecting to admire, almost 
to adore, the British Constitution; but as they advanced, 
they came to look upon it with a sovereign contempt. The 
friends of your National Assembly amongst us have full as 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 409 


mean an opinion of what was formerly thought the glory of 
their country. The Revolution Society has discovered that 
the English nation is not free. They are convinced that the 
inequality in our representation is a “‘ defect in our Consti- 
tution so gross and palpable as to make it excellent chiefly 
in form and theory ;”’ 4—that a representation in the legis- 
lature of a kingdom is not only the basis of all constitutional 
liberty in it, but of “all legitimate government; that with- 
out ita government is nothing but an usurpation ;”’—that, 
‘‘ when the representation is partial, the kingdom possesses 
liberty only partially; and if extremely partial, it gives 
only asemblance; and if not only extremely partial, but cor- 
ruptly chosen, it becomes a nuisance.’”’ Dr. Price considers 
this inadequacy of representation as our fundamental griev- 
ance; and though, as to the corruption of this semblance of 
representation, he hopes it is not yet arrived to its full per- 
fection of depravity, he fears that ‘nothing will be done to- 
wards gaining for us this essential blessing, until some great 
abuse of power again provokes our resentment, or some 
great calamity again alarms our fears, or perhaps till the ac- 
quisition of a pure and equal representation by other coun- 
tries, whilst we are mocked with the shadow, kindles our 
shame.” To thishe subjoins a note in these words:—“ A 
representation chosen chiefly by the Treasury, and a few 
thousands of the dregs of the people, who are generally paid 
for their votes.” 

You will smile here at the consistency of those democrat- 
ists, who, when they are not on their guard, treat the 
humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, 
whilst, at the same time, they pretend to make them the 
depositories of all power. It would require a long discourse 
to point out to you the many fallacies that lurk in the gen- 
erality and equivocal nature of the terms “inadequate rep- 
resentation.”” I shall only say here, in justice to that old- 
fashioned Constitutioi: under which we have long prospered, 
that our representation has been found perfectly adequate to 
all the purposes for which a representation of the people can 


AIO BURKE 


be desired or devised. I defy the enemies of our Constitution 
to show the contrary. To detail the particulars in which it 
is found so well to promote its ends would demand a treatise 
on our practical Constitution. I state here the doctrine of 
the revolutionists, only that you and others may see what 
an opinion these gentlemen entertain of the Constitution of 
their country, and why they seem to think that some great 
abuse of power, or some great calamity, as giving a chance 
for the blessing of a Constitution according to their ideas, 
would be much palliated to their feelings; you see why they 
are somuch enamoured of your fair and equal representa- 
tion, which being once obtained, the same effects might 
follow. You see they consider our House of Commons as 
only “a semblance,” “a form,” ‘‘a theory,” “a shadow,” 
“a mockery,” perhaps “a nuisance.” 

These gentlemen value themselves on being systematic, 
and not without reason. They must therefore look on this 
gross and palpable defect of representation, this fundamental 
grievance (so they call it), as a thing not only vicious in 
itself, but as rendering our whole government absolutely 
illegitimate, and not at all better than a downright usurpation. 
Another revolution, to get rid of this illegitimate and usurped 
government, would of course be perfectly justifiable, if not 
absolutely necessary. Indeed, their principle, if you observe 
it with any attention, goes much further than to an altera- 
tion in the election of the House of Commons; for, if pop- 
ular representation, or choice, is necessary to the legitimacy 
of all government, the House of Lords is, at one stroke, bas- 
tardised and corrupted in blood. That House is no repre- 
sentative of the people at all, even in “semblance” or “in 
form.” The case of the crown is altogether as bad. In vain 
the crown may endeavour to screen itself against these 
gentlemen by the authority of the establishment made on 
the Revolution. The Revolution, which is resorted to fora 
title, on their system, wants a title itself. The Revolution 
is built, according to their theory, upon a basis not more 
solid than our present formalities, as it was made bya House 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 4IiI 


of Lords not representing any one but themselves, and by a 
House of Commons exactly such as the present, that is, as 
they term it, by a mere “shadow and mockery” of repre- 
sentation. 

Something they must destroy, or they seem to themselves 
to exist for no purpose. One set is for destroying the civil 
power through the ecclesiastical ; another for demolishing the 
ecclesiastic through the civil. They are aware that the worst 
consequences might happen to the public in accomplishing 
this double ruin of Church and State; but they are so heated 
with their theories, that they give more than hints that this 
ruin, with all the mischiefs that must lead to it and attend it, 
and which to themselves appear quite certain, would not be 
unacceptable to them, or very remote from their wishes. A 
man amongst them of great authority, and certainly of great 
talents, speaking of a supposed alliance between Church and 
State, says, “ Perhaps we must wait for the fall of the civil 
powers, before this most unnatural alliance be broken. 
Calamitous, no doubt, will that time be. But what convul- 
sion in the political world ought to be a subject of lamenta- 
tion, if it be attended with so desirable an effect?” You 
see with what a steady eye these gentlemen are prepared to 
view the greatest calamities which can befall their country! 

It is no wonder, therefore, that, with these ideas of every- 
thing in their Constitution and government at home, either 
in Church or State, as illegitimate and usurped, or at best as 
a vain mockery, they look abroad with an eager and passion- 
ate enthusiasm. Whilst they are possessed by these notions, 
it is vain to talk to them of the practice of their ancestors, 
the fundamental laws of their country, the fixed form of a 
Constitution whose merits are confirmed by the solid test of 
long experience and an increasing public strength and na- 
tional prosperity. They despise experience as the wisdom of 
unlettered men ; and as for the rest, they have wrought un- 
der ground amine that will blow up, at one grand explosion, 
all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters, and acts 
of Parliament. They have “the rights of men.” Against 


AI2 BURKE 


these there can be no prescription ; against these no argu- 
ment is binding : these admit no temperament and no com- 
promise : anything withheld from their full demand is so 
much of fraud and injustice. Against these their rights of 
men let no government look for security in the length of its 
continuance, or in the justice and lenity of its administration. 
The objections of these speculatists, if its forms do not quad- 
rate with their theories, are as valid against such an old and 
beneficent government as against the most violent tyranny 
or the greenest usurpation. They are always at issue with 
governments, not on a question of abuse, but a question of 
competency and a question of title. I have nothing to say 
to the clumsy subtilty of their political metaphysics. Let 
them be their amusement in the schools. 


Illa se jactet in aula 
fEolus, et clauso ventorum carcere regnet. 


But let them not break prison to burst like a Levanter, to 
sweep the earth with their hurricane, and to break up the 
fountains of the great deep to overwhelm us! 

Far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart 
from withholding in practise (if I were of power to give or 
to withhold), the real rights of men. In denying their false 
claims of right, I do not mean to injure those which are real, 
and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy. 
If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the 
advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an 
institution of beneficence ; and law itself is only beneficence 
acting by arule. Men have a right to live by that rule ; 
they have a right to justice, as between their fellows, wheth- 
er their fellows are in politic function orin ordinary occupa- 
tion. They have a right to the fruits of their industry, and 
to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have 
a right to the acquisitions of their parents, to the nourish- 
ment and improvement of their offspring, to instruction in 
life and to consolation in death. Whatever each man can sep- 
arately do, without trespassing upon others, he hasa right to 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 413 


do for himself ; and he has a right to a fair portion of all 
which society, with all its combinations of skilland force, can 
doin his favour. In this partnership all men have equal 
rights ; but not to equal things. He that has but five shil- 
lings in the partnership has as good a right to it as he that 
has five hundred pounds has to his larger proportion ; but he 
has not a right to an equal dividend in the product of the joint 
stock. And astothe share of power, authority, and direction 
which eachindividual ought to have in the management of 
the state, that I must deny to be amongst the direct original 
rights of manin civil society; for I have in my contempla- 
tion the civil social man, and no other. It is a thing to be 
settled by convention. 

If civil society be the offspring of convention, that con- 
vention must be its law. That convention must limit and 
modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed 
under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executory 
power are its creatures. They can have no being in any 
other state of things; and how can any man claim, under 
the conventions of civil society, rights which do not so much 
as suppose its existence,—rights which are absolutely repug- 
nant to it? One of the first motives to civil society, and 
which becomes one of its fundamental rules, is, that no man 
should be judge in his own cause. By this each person has 
at once divested himself of the first fundamental right of un- 
covenanted man, that is, to judge for himself, and to assert 
his own cause. He abdicates all right to be his own gover- 
nor. He inclusively, in a great measure, abandons the right 
of self-defense, the first law of Nature. Men can not enjoy 
the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together. That 
he may obtain justice, he gives up his right of determining 
what it is in points the most essential to him. That he may 
secure some liberty, he makes a surrender in trust of the 
whole of it. 

Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which 
may and do exist in total independence of it, —and exist in 
much greater clearness, and in a much greater degree of 


AI4 BURKE 


abstract perfection : but their abstract perfection is their prac- 
tical defect. By having a right to everything they want 
everything. Government isa contrivance of human wisdom 
to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these 
wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these 
wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a 
sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not 
only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, 
but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individ- 
uals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, 
their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjec- 
tion. This can only be done by a power out of themselves, 
and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will 
and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and sub- 
due. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their 
liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the 
liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circum- 
stances, and admit of infinite modifications, they can not be 
settled upon any abstract rule ; and nothing is so foolish as 
to discuss them upon that principle. 

The moment you abate anything from the full rights of 
men each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial, posi- 
tive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the 
whole organization of government becomes a consideration 
of convenience. This it is which makes the constitution of 
a state, and the due distribution of its powers, a matter of 
the most delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep 
knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and of 
the things which facilitate or obstruct the various ends which 
are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil institutions. 
The state is to have recruits to its strength and remedies to 
its distempers. What is the use of discussing a man’s 
abstract right to food or medicine? The question is upon 
the method of procuring and administering them. In that 
deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of the 
farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of 
metaphysics. 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 4T5 


The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovat- 
ing it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental 
science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short expe 
rience that can instruct us in that practical science; because 
the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate, 
but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be ex- 
cellent in its remoter operation, and its excellence may arise 
even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The 
reverse also happens; and very plausible schemes, with very 
pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamen- 
table conclusions. In states there are often some obscure 
and almost latent causes, things which appear at first view of 
little moment, on which a very great part of its prosperity or 
adversity may most essentially depend. The science of 
government being, therefore, so practical in itself, and in- 
tended for such practical purposes, a matter which requires 
experience, and even more experience than any person can 
gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he 
may be, it is with infinite caution that any man ought to 
venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in 
any tolerable degree forages the common purposes of society, 
or on building it up again without having models and 
patterns of approved utility before his eyes. 

These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like 
rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the 
laws of Nature, refracted from their straight line. Indeed, 
in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and 
concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety 
of refractions and reflections that it becomes absurd to talk 
of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their original 
direction. The nature of man is intricate; the objects of 
society are of the greatest possible complexity: and there- 
fore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suit- 
able either to man’s nature or to the quality of his affairs. 
when I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at and 
boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no loss 
to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of their trade 


416 BURKE 


or totally negligent of their duty. The simple governments 
are fundamentally defective, to say no worse of them. If 
you were to contemplate society in but one point of view, 
all these simple modes of polity are infinitely captivating. 
In effect each would answer its single end much more per- 
fectly than the most complex is able to attain all its com- 
plex purposes. But it is better that the whole should be 
imperfectly and anomalously answered than that while some 
parts are provided for with great exactness, others might be 
totally neglected, or perhaps materially injured, by the over- 
care of a favourite member. 

The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes; 
and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are 
morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a 
sort of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to 
be discerned. The rights of men in governments are their 
advantages ; and these are often in balances between differ- 
ences of good,—in compromises sometimes between good and 
evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political reason 
is a computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying, 
and dividing, morally, and not metaphysically, or mathe- 
matically, true moral denominations, 

By these theorists the right of the people is almost always 
sophistically confounded with their power. The body of 
the community, whenever it can come to act, can meet with 
no effectual resistance ; but till power and right are the same, 
the whole body of them has no right inconsistent with 
virtue, and the first of all virtues, prudence. Men have no 
right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their 
benefit; for though a pleasant writer said, “ Liceat perire 
poetis,” when one of them, in cold blood, is said to have 
leaped into the flames of a volcanic revolution, “‘ardentem 
frigidus A£tnam insiluit,’’ I consider such a frolic rather as an 
unjustifiable poetic license than as one of the franchises of 
Parnassus; and whether he were poet, or divine, or politi- 
cian, that chose to exercise this kind of right, I think that 
more wise, because more charitable, thoughts would urge me 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 417 


rather to save the man than to preserve his brazen slippers 
as the monuments of his folly. 


The kind of anniversary sermons to which a great part of 
what I write refers, if men are not shamed out of their 
present course, in commemorating the fact, will cheat many 
out of the principles and deprive them of the benefits of the 
Revolution they commemorate. I confess to you, Sir, I 
never liked this continual talk of resistance and revolution, 
or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the Con- 
stitution its daily bread. It renders the habit of society 
dangerously valetudinary ; it is taking periodical doses of 
mercury sublimate, and swallowing down repeated provoca- 
tives of cantharides to our love of liberty. 

This distemper of remedy, grown habitual, relaxes and 
wears out, by a vulgar and prostituted use, the spring of that 
spirit, which is to be exerted on great occasions. It was in 
the most patient period of Roman servitude that themes of 
tyrannicide made the ordinary exercise of boys at school,— 
cum perimit szevos classis numerosa tyrannos. In the ordi- 
nary state of things, it produces in a country like ours the 
worst effects, even on the cause of that liberty which it 
abuses with the dissoluteness of an extravagant speculation. 
Almost all the high-bred republicans of my time have, after 
a short space, become the most decided, thorough-paced 
courtiers ; they soon left the business of a tedious, moderate, 
but practical resistance, to those of us whom, in the pride 
and intoxication of their theories, they have slighted as not 
much better than Tories. Hypocrisy, of course, delights in 
the most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go 
beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent. 
But even in cases where rather levity than fraud was to be 
suspected in these ranting speculations, the issue has been 
much the same. These professors, finding their extreme 
principles not applicable to cases which call only for a quali- 
fied, or, as I may say, civil and legal resistance, in such cases 


employ no resistance at all. It is with them a war or a 
27 


418 BURKE 


revolution, oritisnothing. Finding their schemes of politics 
not adapted to the state of the world in which they live, they 
often come to think lightly of all public principle, and are 
ready, on their part, to abandon for a very trivial interest 
what they find of very trivial value. Some, indeed, are of 
more steady and persevering natures; but these are eager 
politicians out of Parliament, who have little totempt them 
to abandon their favourite projects. They have some change 
in the Church or State, or both, constantly in their view. 
When that is the case, they are always bad citizens, and per- 
fectly unsure connections. For, considering their specula- 
tive designs as of infinite value, and the actual arrangement 
of the state as of no estimation, they are, at best, indifferent 
about it. They see no merit in the good, and no fault in 
the vicious management of public affairs ; they rather rejoice 
in the latter, as more propitious to revolution. They see no 
merit or demerit in any man, or any action, or any political 
principle, any further than as they may forward or retard 
their design of change ; they therefore take up, one day, the 
most violent and stretched prerogative, and another time the 
wildest democratic ideas of freedom, and pass from the one 
to the other without any sort of regard to cause, to person, 
or to party. 

In France you are now in the crisis of a revolution, and 
in the transit from one form of government to another: you 
can not see that character of men exactly in the same situa- 
tion in which we see it in this country. With us it is mili- 
tant, with you it is triumphant; and you know how it can 
act, when its power is commensurate to its will. I would 
not be supposed to confine those observations to any descrip- 
tion of men, or to comprehend all men of any description 
within them,—no, far from it! I am as incapable of that 
injustice as I am of keeping terms with those who profess 
principles of extremes, and who, under the name of religion, 
teach little else than wild and dangerous politics. The worst 
of these politics of revolution isthis: they temper and harden 
the breast, in order to prepare it for the desperate strokes 


me 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 419 


which are sometimes used in extreme occasions. But as 
these occasions may never arrive, the mind receives a gratui- 
tous taint ; and the moral sentiments suffer not a little, when 
no political purpose is served by the depravation. This sort 
of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights 
of man, that they have totally forgot his nature. Without 
opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have 
succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart. They 
have perverted in themselves, and in those that attend 
to them, all the well-placed sympathies of the human 
breast. 

This famous sermon of the Old Jewry breathes nothing 
but this spirit through all the political part. Plots, massa- 
cres, assassinations, seem to some people a trivial price for 
obtaining a revolution. A cheap, bloodless reformation, a 
guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to their taste. There 
must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent 
stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the 
imagination, grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty 
years’ security, and the still unanimating repose of public 
prosperity. The preacher found them all in the French 
Revolution. This inspires a juvenile warmth through his 
whole frame. His enthusiasm kindles as he advances; and 
when he arrives at his peroration, it is in a full blaze. Then 
viewing, from the Pisgah of his pulpit, the free, moral, 
happy, flourishing, and glorious state of France, as in a bird- 
eye landscape of a promised land, he breaks out into the 
following rapture :— 

“ What an eventful period is this! I am thankful that I 
have lived to it; I could almost say, ‘ Lord, now lettest thou 
thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy 
salvation.’—I have lived to see a diffusion of knowledge which 
has undermined superstition and error.—I have lived to see 
the rights of men better understood than ever, and nations 
panting for liberty which seemed to have lost the idea of it — 
I have lived to see thirty millions of people, indignant and 
resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an 


420 BURKE 


irresistible voice ; their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary 
monarch surrendering himself to his subjects.” # 

Before I proceed further, I have to remark that Dr. Price 
seems rather to overvalue the great acquisitions of light 
which he has obtained and diffused in this age. The last 
century appears to me to have been quite as much enlight- 
ened. It had, though in a different place, a triumph as 
memorable as that of Dr. Price; and some of the great 
preachers of that period partook of it as eagerly as he has 
done in the triumph of France. On the trial of the Reverend 
Hugh Peters for high treason, it was deposed, that, when 
King Charles was brought to London for his trial, the Apostle 
of Liberty in that day conducted the triumph. “I saw,” 
says the witness, “‘ his Majesty in the coach with six horses, 
and Peters riding before the king triumphing.” Dr. Price, 
when he talks as if he had made a discovery, only follows a 
precedent; for, after the commencement of the king’s trial, 
this precursor, the same Dr. Peters, concluding a long prayer 
at the royal chapel at Whitehall, (he had very triumphantly 
chosen his place,) said, ‘“I have prayed and preached these 
twenty years; and now I may say with old Simeon, ‘ Lord, 
now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes 
have seen thy salvation.’’8 Peters had not the fruits of his 
prayer; for he neither departed so soon as he wished, nor 
in peace. He became (what I heartily hope none of his 
followers may be in this country) himself a sacrifice to the 
triumph which he led as pontiff. They dealt at the Restora- 
tion, perhaps, too hardly with this poor good man. But we 
owe it to hismemory and his sufferings, that he had as much 
illumination and as much zeal, and had as effectually under- 
mined all the superstition and error which might impede the 
great business he was engaged in, as any who follow and 
repeat after him in this age, which would assume to itself an 
exclusive title to the knowledge of the rights of men, and all 
the glorious consequences of that knowledge. 

After this sally of the preacher of the Old Jewry, which 
differs only in place and time, but agrees perfectly with the 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION A421 


spirit and letter of the rapture of 1648, the Revolution So- 
ciety, the fabricators of governments, the heroic band of 


cashierers of monarchs, electors of sovereigns, and leaders of - 


kings in triumph, strutting with a proud,consciousness of 
the diffusion of knowledge, of which every member had ob- 
tained so large a share in the donative, were in haste to make 
a generous diffusion of the knowledge they had thus gratui- 
tously received. To make this bountiful communication, 
they adjourned from the church in the Old Jewry to the 
London Tavern, where the same Dr. Price, in whom the 
fumes of his oracular tripod were not entirely evaporated, 
moved and carried the resolution, or address of congratula- 
tion, transmitted by Lord Stanhope to the National Assem- 
bly of France. o 

I find a preacher of the Gospel profaning the beautiful and 
prophetic ejaculation, commonly called “ Nunc dimittis,” 
made on the first presentation of our Saviour in the temple, 
and applying it, with an inhuman and unnatural rapture, to 
the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle that per- 
haps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of man- 
kind. This“ leading in triumph,” a thing in its best form 
unmanly and irreligious, which fills our preacher with such 
unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral 
taste of every well-born mind. Several English were the 
stupefied and indignant spectators of that triumph. It was 
(unless we have been strangely deceived) a spectacle more 
resembling a procession of American savages entering into 
Onondaga after some of their murders called victories, and 
leading into hovels hung round with scalps their captives 
overpowered with the scoffs and buffets of women as fero- 


cious as themselves, much more than it resembled the, 


triumphal pomp of a civilized martial nation ;—if a civilized 
nation, or any men who had a sense of generosity, were ca- 
pable of a personal triumph over the fallen and afflicted. 
This, my dear Sir, was not the triumph of France. I must 
believe, that, as a nation, it overwhelmed you with shame 
and horror. I must believe that the National Assembly find 


A422 BURKE 


themselves in a state of the greatest humiliation in not 
being able to punish the authors of thistriumph or the actors 
in it, and that they are in a situation in which any inquiry 
they may make upon the subject must be destitute even of 
the appearance of liberty or impartiality. The apology of 
that assembly is found in their situation; but when we ap- 
prove what they must bear, it is in us the degenerate choice 
of a vitiated mind. 

With a compelled appearance of deliberation, they vote 
under the dominion of a stern necessity. They sit in the 
heart, as it were, of a foreign republic: they have their resi- 
dence ina city whose constitution has emanated neither from 
the charter of their king nor from their legislative power. 
There they are surrounded by an army not raised either by 
the authority of their crown or by their command, and which, 
if they should order to dissolve itself, would instantly dis- 
solve them. There they sit, after a gang of assassins had 
driven away some hundreds of the members; whilst those 
who held the same moderate principles, with more patience 
or better hope, continued every day exposed to outrageous 
insults and murderous threats. There a majority, some- 
times real, sometimes pretended, captive itself, compels a 
captive king to issue as royal edicts, at a third hand, the pol- 
luted nonsense of their most licentious and giddy coffee- 
houses. It is notorious that all their measures are decided 
before they are debated. It is beyond doubt, that, under 
the terror of the bayonet, and the lamp-post, and the 
torch to their houses, they are obliged to adopt all the crude 
and desperate measures suggested by clubs composed of a 
monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations. 
Among these are found persons in comparison of whom 
Catiline would be thought scrupulous, and Cethegus a man of 
sobriety and moderation. Nor is it inthese clubs alone that 
the public measures are deformed into monsters. They un- 
dergo a previous distortion in academies, intended as so many 
seminaries for these clubs, which are set up in all the places 
of public resort. In these meetings of all sorts, every coun- 


1899 by D.Appleton &Co- 


C opyright 


, 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 423 


sel, in proportion as it is daring and violent and perfidious, 
is taken for the mark of superior genius. Humanity and 
compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and 
ignorance. Tenderness to individuals is considered as treason 
to the public. Liberty is always to be estimated perfect as 
property is rendered insecure. Amidst assassination, mas- 
sacre and confiscation, perpetrated or meditated, they are 
forming plans for the good order of future society. Em- 
bracing in their arms the carcasses of base criminals, and 
promoting their relations on the title of their offences, they 
drive hundreds of virtuous persons to the same end, by 
forcing them to subsist by beggary or by crime. 

The Assembly, their organ, acts before them the farce of 
deliberation with as little decency asliberty. They act like 
the comedians of a fair, before a riotous audience ; they act 
amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious 
men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their 
insolent fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode them, and 
sometimes mix and take their seats amongst them,—domi- 
neering over them with a strange mixture of servile petu- 
lance and proud, presumptuous authority. Asthey have in- 
verted order in all things, the gallery is in the place of the 
house. This assembly, which overthrows kings and king- 
doms, has not even the physiognomy and aspect of a grave 
legislative body,—‘‘nec color imperii, nec frons erat ulla 
senatis.” They havea power given to them, like that of the 
Evil Principle, to subvert and destroy,—but none to con- 
struct, except such machines as may be fitted for further 
subversion and further destruction. 

Who is it that admires, and from the heart is attached to 
national representative assemblies, but must turn with horror 
and disgust from such a profane burlesque and abominable 
perversion of that sacred institute? Lovers of monarchy, 
lovers of republics, must alike abhor it. The members of 
your Assembly must themselves groan under the tyranny of 
which they have all the shame, none of the direction, and 
little of the profit. I am sure many of the members who 


A424 BURKE 


compose even the majority of that body must feel as I do, 
notwithstanding the applauses of the Revolution Society. 
Miserable king! miserable assembly! How must that as- 
sembly be silently scandalized with those of their members 
who could call a day which seemed to blot the sun out of 
heaven “un beau jour!’44 How must they be inwardly in- 
dignant at hearing others who thought fit to declare to them, 
“that the vessel of the state would fly forward in her course 
towards regeneration with more speed than ever,’ from the 
stiff gale of treason and murder which preceded our preacher's 
triumph! What must they have felt, whilst, with outward pa- 
tience and inward indignation, they heard of the slaughter of 
innocent gentlemen in their houses, that “the blood spilled 
was not the most pure’?! What must they have felt, when 
they were besieged by complaints of disorders which shook 
their country to its foundations, at being compelled coolly 
to tell the complainants that they were under the protection 
of the law, and that they would address the king (the captive 
king) to cause the laws to be enforced for their protection, 
when the enslaved ministers of that captive king had for- 
mally notified to them that there were neither law nor au- 
thority nor power left to protect! What must they have 
felt at being obliged, as a felicitation on the present new 
year, to request their captive king to forget the stormy 
period of the last, on account of the great good which he 
was likely to produce to his people,—to the complete attain- 
ment of which good they adjourned the practical demon- 
strations of their loyalty, assuring him of their obedience 
when he should no longer possess any authority to command ! 

This address was made with much good-nature and affec- 
tion, to be sure. But among the revolutions in France must 
be reckoned a considerable revolution in their ideas of polite- 
ness. In England we are said to learn manners at second- 
hand from your side of the water, and that we dress our be- 
haviour in the frippery of France. If so, we are still in the 
old cut, and have not so far conformed to the new Parisian 
mode of good breeding as to think it quite in the most 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 425 


refined strain of delicate compliment (whether in condolence 
or congratulation) to say, to the most humiliated creature 
that crawls upon the earth, that great public benefits are 
derived from the murder of his servants, the attempted 
assassination of himself and of his wife, and the mortifica- 
tion, disgrace, and degradation that he has personally suf- 
fered. It isa topic of consolation which our ordinary of 
Newgate would be too humane to use to a criminal at the 
foot of the gallows. I should have thought that the hang- 
man of Paris, now that he is liberalized by the vote of the 
National Assembly, and is allowed his rank and arms in the 
Herald’s College of the rights of men, would be too gener- 
ous, too gallant a man, too full of the sense of his new 
dignity, to employ that cutting consolation to any of the 
persons whom the léze-nation might bring under the admin- 
istration of his executive powers. 

A man is fallen indeed, when he is thus flattered. The 
anodyne draught of oblivion, thus drugged, is well calculated 
to preserve a galling wakefulness, and to feed the living 
ulcer of a corroding memory. Thus to administer the opiate 
potion of amnesty, powdered with all the ingredients of 
scorn and contempt, is to hold to his lips, instead of “the 
balm of hurt minds,” the cup of human misery full to the 
brim, and to force him to drink it to the dregs. 

Yielding to reasons at least as forcible as those which were 
so delicately urged in the compliment on the new year, the 
king of France will probably endeavour to forget these events 
and that compliment. But History, who keeps a durable 
record of all our acts, and exercises her awful censure over 
the proceedings of all sorts of sovereigns, will not forget 
either those events, or the era of this liberal refinement in 
the intercourse of mankind. History will record, that, on 
the morning of the sixth of October, 1789, the king and 
queen of France, after a day of confusion, alarm, dismay, 
and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged security of public 
faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite, and 
troubled, melancholy repose. From this sleep the queen 


426 BURKE 


was first startled by the voice of the sentinel at her door, 
who cried out to her to save herself by flight,—that this was 
the last proof of fidelity he could give,—that they were upon 
him, and he was dead. Instantly he was cut down. A 
band of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood, 
rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced witha 
hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from 
whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly 
almost naked, and, through ways unknown to the murderers, 
had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband» 
not secure of his own life for a moment. 

This king, to say no more of him, and this queen, and 
their infant children, (who once would have been the pride 
and hope of a great and generous people), were then forced 
to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the 
world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by mas- 
sacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated car- 
casses. Thence they were conducted into the capital of 
their kingdom. Two had been selected from the unprovoked, 
unresisted, promiscuous slaughter which was made of the 
gentlemen of birth and family who composed the king’s body- 
guard. These two gentlemen, with all the parade of an execu- 
tion of justice, were cruelly and publicly dragged to the block, 
and beheaded in the great court of the palace. Their heads 
were stuck uponspears, and led the procession; whilst the 
royal captives who followed in the train were slowly moved 
along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and fran- 
tic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable 
abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the 
vilest of women. After they had been made to taste, drop 
by drop, more than the bitterness of death, in the slow torture 
of a journey of twelve miles, protracted to six hours, they 
were, under a guard composed of those very soldiers who 
had thus conducted them through this famous triumph, lodged 
in one of the old palaces of Paris, now converted into a 
Bastile for kings. 

Is this a triumph to be consecrated at altars, to be com- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 427 


memorated with grateful thanksgiving, to be offered to the 
Divine Humanity with fervent prayer and enthusiastic 
ejaculation ?>—These Theban and Thracian orgies, acted in 
France, and applauded only in the Old Jewry, I assure you, 
kindle prophetic enthusiasm in the minds but of very few 
people in this kingdom; although a saint and apostle, who 
may have revelations of his own, and who has so completely 
vanquished all the mean superstitions of the heart, may 
incline to think it pious and decorous to compare it with the 
entrance into the world of the Prince of Peace, proclaimed 
in an holy temple by a venerable sage, and not long before 
not worse announced by the voice of angels to the quiet 
innocence of shepherds. 

At first I was at a loss to account for this fit of unguarded 
transport. I knew, indeed, that the sufferings of monarchs 
make a delicious repast to some sort of palates. There were 
reflections which might serve to keep this appetite within 
some bounds of temperance. But when I took one circum- 
stance into my consideration, I was obliged to confess that 
much allowance ought to be made for the society, and that 
the temptation was too strong for common discretion: I 
mean, the circumstance of the Io Pzan of the triumph, the 
animating cry which called for “all the bishops to be hanged 
on the lamp-posts,”” might well have brought forth a burst 
of enthusiasm on the foreseen consequences of this happy 
day. Iallow to so much enthusiasm some little deviation 
from prudence. I allow this prophet to break forth into 
hymns of joy and thanksgiving on an event which appears 
like the precursor of the Millennium, and the projected Fifth 
Monarchy, in the destruction of all Church establishments, 
There was, however, (as in all human affairs there is,) in the 
midst of this joy, something to exercise the patience of these 
worthy gentlemen, and to try the long-suffering of their faith. 
The actual murder of the king and queen, and their child, 
was wanting to the other auspicious circumstances of this 
“beautiful day.” The actual murder of the bishops, though 
called for by so many holy ejaculations, was also wanting. 


428 BURKE 


A group of regicide and sacrilegious slaughter was, indeed, 
boldly sketched, but it was only sketched. It unhappily 
was left unfinished, in this great history-piece of the mas- 
sacre of innocents. What hardy pencil of a great master, 
from the school of the rights of men, will finish it, is to be 
seen hereafter. The age has not yet the complete benefit 
of that diffusion of knowledge that has undermined super- 
stition and error; and the king of France wants another 
object or two to consign to oblivion, in consideration of all 
the good which is to arise from his own sufferings, and the 
patriotic crimes of an enlightened age.'® 

Although this work of our new light and knowledge did 
not go to the length that in all probability it was intended it 
should be carried, yet I must think that such treatment of 
any human creatures must be shocking to any but those 
who are made for accomplishing revolutions. But Ican not 
stop here. Influenced by the inborn feelings of my nature, 
and not being illuminated by a single ray of this new-sprung 
modern light, I confess to you, Sir, that the exalted rank of 
the persons suffering, and particularly the sex, the beauty, 
and the amiable qualities of the descendant of so many 
kings and emperors, with the tender age of royal infants, 
insensible only through infancy and innocence of the cruel 
outrages to which their parents were exposed, instead of 
being a subject of exultation, adds not ia little to my sensi- 
bility on that most melancholy occasion. 

I hear that the august person who was the principal object 
of our preacher’s triumph, though he supported himself, felt 
much on that shameful occasion. As aman, it became him 
to feel for his wife and his children, and the faithful guards 
of his person that were massacred in cold blood about him ; 
as a prince, it became him to feel for the strange and fright- 
ful transformation of his civilized subjects, and to be more 
grieved for them than solicitous for himself. It derogates 
little from his fortitude, while it adds infinitely to the honour 
of his humanity. Iam very sorry to say it, very sorry 
indeed, that such personages are in a situation in which 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 429 


it is not unbecoming in us to praise the virtues of the 
great. 

I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that the great lady, the other 
object of the triumph, has borne that day, (one is interested 
that beings made for suffering should suffer well,) and that 
she bears all the succeeding days, that she bears the imprison- 
ment of her husband, and her own captivity, and the exile 
of her friends, and the insulting adulation of addresses, and 
the whole weight of her accumulated wrongs, with a serene 
patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race, and be- 
coming the offspring of a sovereign distinguished for her piety 
and her courage; that, like her, she has lofty sentiments; 
that she feels with the dignity of a Roman matron; that in 
the last extremity she will save herself from the last dis- 
grace; and that, if she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble 
hand. 

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen 
of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely 
never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, 
a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, 
decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began 
to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life and 
splendour and joy. Oh! whata revolution! and what an 
heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that 
elevation and that fall!- Little did I dream, when she added 
titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respect- 
ful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp 
antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom! little did 
I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen 
upon her ina nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of 
honour, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords 
must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look 
that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is 
gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has 
succeeded; and the glory of Europe in extinguished forever. 
Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty 
to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified 


430 BURKE 


obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, 
even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! 
The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, 
the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! 
It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, 
which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage 
whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it 
touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by 
losing all its grossness ! 

This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin 
in the ancient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in 
its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, sub- 
sisted and influenced through a long succession of generations, 
even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally 
extinguished, the loss, I fear, will be great. It is this which 
has given its character to modern Europe. It is this which 
has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and 
distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia, and 
possibly from those states which flourished in the most 
brilliant periods of the antique world. It was this, which, 
without confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality, 
and handed it down through all the gradations of social 
life. It was this opinion which mitigated kings into com- 
panions, and raised private men to be fellows with kings. 
Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness 
of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the 
soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to 
submit to elegance, and gave a domination, vanquisher of 
laws, to be subdued by manners. 

But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions 
which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which 
harmonized the different shades of life,and which bya bland 
assimilation incorporated into politics the sentiments which 
beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by > 
this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the 
decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the 
superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 431 


imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding 
ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, 
shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own esti- 
mation, are to be exploded, as a ridiculous, absurd, and 
antiquated fashion. 

On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is 
but a woman, a woman is but an animal,—and an animal not 
of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general 
as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as ro- 
mance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege, 
are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by 
destroying its simplicity. The murder of aking, or a queen, 
or a bishop, or a father, are only common homicide,—and 
if the people are by any chance or in any way gainers by it, 
a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into 
which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny. 

On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the 
offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and 
which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste 
and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own 
terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find 
in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to 
them from his own private interests. In the groves of their 
academy, at the end of every visto, you see nothing but the 
gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on 
the part of the commonwealth. On the principles of this 
mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embod- 
ied, if I may use the expression, in persons,—so as to create 
in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that 
sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of 
filling their place. These public affections, combined with 
manners, are required sometimes as supplements, sometimes 
as correctives, always as aids to law. The precept given by 
a wise man, as well as a great critic, for the construction of 
poems, is equally true as to states :—“ Non satis est pulchra 
esse poemata, dulcia sunto.” There ought to be a system 
of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind would 


A32 BURKE 


be disposed to relish. To make us love our country, our 
country ought to be lovely. 

But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock 
in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other 
and worse means for its support. The usurpation, which, 
in order to subvert ancient institutions, has destroyed an- 
cient principles, will hold power by arts similar to those by 
which it has acquired it. When the old feudal and chival- 
rous spirit of fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, 
freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of 
tyranny, shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and as- 
sassinations will be anticipated by preventive murder and 
preventive confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody 
maxims which form the political code of all power not stand- 
ing on its own honour and the honour of those who are to 
obey it. Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects 
are rebels from principle. 

When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, 
the loss can not possibly be estimated. From that moment 
we have no compass to govern us, nor can we know distinctly 
to what port we steer. Europe, undoubtedly, taken ina 
mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on which your 
Revolution was completed. How much of that prosperous 
state was owing to the spirit of our old manners and opinions 
is not easy to say ; but as such causes can not be indifferent 
in their operation, we must presume, that, on the whole, 
their operation was beneficial. 

We are but too apt to consider things in the state in 
which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the 
causes by which they have been produced, and possibly may 
be upheld. Nothing is more certain than that our manners, 
our civilization, and all the good things which are connected 
with manners and with civilization, have, in this European 
world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles, and 
were, indeed, the result of both combined: I mean the spirit 
of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility 
and the clergy, the one by profession, and the other by 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 433 


patronage, kept learning in existence, even in the midst of 
arms and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in 
their causes than formed. Learning paid back what it re- 
ceived to nobility and to priesthood, and paid it with usury, 
by enlarging their ideas, and by furnishing their minds. 
Happy, if they had all continued to know their indissoluble 
union, and their proper place! Happy, if learning, not de- 
bauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the in- 
structor, and not aspired to be the master! Along with its 
natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into 
the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish 
multitude.” 

If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are 
always willing to own to ancient manners, so do other in- 
terests which we value full as much asthey are worth. Even 
commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our 
economical politicians, are themselves perhaps but creatures, 
are themselves but effects, which, as first causes, we choose 
to worship. They certainly grew under the same shade in 
which learning flourished. They, too, may decay with their 
natural protecting principles. With you, for the present at 
least, they all threaten to disappear together. Where trade 
and manufactures are wanting to a people, and the spirit of 
nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not 
always ill supplies, their place; but if commerce and the 
arts should be lost in an experiment to try how well a state 
may stand without these old fundamental principles, what 
sort of a thing must bea nation of gross, stupid, ferocious, 
and at the same time poor and sordid barbarians, destitute 
of religion, honour, or manly pride, possessing nothing at 
present, and hoping for nothing hereafter ? 

I wish you may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, 
to that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there 
appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness and vulgarity, 
in all the proceedings of the Assembly and of all their in- 
structors. Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is pre- 


sumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and brutal. 
28 


A34 BURKE 


It is not clear whether in England we learned those grand 
and decorous principles and manners, of which considerable 
traces yet remain, from you, or whether you took them from 
us. But to you, I think, we trace them best. You seem to 
me to be gentisincunabula nostre. France has always more 
or less influenced manners in England; and when your 
fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run 
long or not run clear with us, or perhaps with any nation. 
This gives all Europe, in my opinion, but too close and con- 
nected a concern in what is done in France. Excuse me, 
therefore, if I have dwelt too longon the atrocious spectacle 
of the sixth of October, 1789, or have given too much scope 
to the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion 
of the most important of all revolutions, which may be dated 
from that day: I mean a revolution in sentiments, manners, 
and moral opinions. As things now stand, with everything 
respectable destroyed without us, and an attempt to destroy 
within us every principle of respect, one is almost forced to 
apologize for harbouring the common feelings of men. 


' Why dol feel so differently from the Reverend Dr. Price, 
and those of his lay flock who will choose to adopt the sen- 
timents of his discourse >—For this plain reason : Because it 
is natural I should ; because we are so made as to be affect- 
ed at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon the 
unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous 
uncertainty of human greatness ; because in those natural 
feelings we learn great lessons ; because in events like these 
our passions instruct our reason ; because, when kings are 
hurled from their thrones by the Supreme Director of this 
great drama, and become the objects of insult to the base 
and of pity to the good, we behold such disasters in the 
moral as we should behold a miracle in the physical order 
of things. We are alarmed into reflection ; our minds (as 
it has long since been observed) are purified by terror and 
pity ; our weak, unthinking pride is humbled under the dis- 
pensations of a mysterious wisdom. Some tears might be 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 435 


drawn from me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the 
stage. I should be truly ashamed of finding in myself that 
superficial, theatric sense of painted distress, whilst I could 
exult over it in real life. With such a perverted mind, I 
could never venture to show my face ata tragedy. People 
would think the tears that Garrick formerly, or that Siddons 
not long since, have extorted from me, were the tears of 
hypocrisy ; I should know them to be the tears of folly. 
Indeed, the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments 
than churches where the feelings of humanity are thus out- 
raged. Poets who have to deal with an audience not yet 
graduated in the school of the rights of men, and who must 
apply themselves to the moral constitution of the heart, 
would not dare to produce such atriumph as a matter of 
exultation. There, where men follow their natural impulses, 
they would not bear the odious maxims of a Machiavelian 
policy, whether applied to the attainment of monarchical or 
democratic tyranny. They would reject them on the mod- 
ern, as they once did on the ancient stage, where they could 
not bear even the hypothetical proposition of such wicked- 
ness in the mouth of a personated tyrant, though suitable to 
the character he sustained. No theatric audience in Athens 
would bear what has been borne in the midst of the real 
tragedy of this triumphal day: a principal actor weighing, as 
it were in scales hung in a shop of horrors, so much actual 
crime against so much contingent advantages,—and after put- 
ting in and out weights, declaring that the balance was on 
the side of the advantages. They would not bear to see the 
crimes of new democracy posted as ina ledger against the 
crimes of old despotism, and the book-keepers of politics 
finding democracy still in debt, but by no means unable or 
unwilling to pay the balance. In the theatre, the first in- 
tuitive glance, without any elaborate process of reasoning, 
would show that this method of political computation would 
justify every extent ofcrime. They would see, that on these 
principles, even where the very worst acts were not perpe- 
trated, it was owing rather to the fortune of the conspirators 


436 BURKE 


than to their parsimony in the expenditure of treachery and 
blood. They would soon see that criminal means, once tol- 
erated, are soon preferred. They present a shorter cut to the 
object than through the highway ofthe moral virtues. Justi- 
fying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit 
would soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the 
end,—until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful 
than revenge, could satiate their insatiable appetites. Such 
must be the consequences of losing, in the splendour of these 
triumphs of the rights of men, all natural sense of wrong and 
right. 

But the reverend pastor exults in this “leading in 
triumph,” because, truly, Louis the Sixteenth was “ an arbi- 
trary monarch”: that is, in other words, neither more nor 
less than because he was Louis the Sixteenth, and because 
he had the misfortune to be born king of France, with the 
prerogatives of which a long line of ancestors, and a long 
acquiescence of the people, without any act of his, had put 
him in possession. A misfortune it has indeed turned out to 
him, that he was born king of France. But misfortune is 
not crime, nor is indiscretion always the greatest guilt. I 
shall never think that a prince, the acts of whose whole reign 
were a series of concessions to his subjects, who was willing 
to relax his authority, to remit his prerogatives, to call his 
people toa share of freedom not known, perhaps not desired, 
by their ancestors,—such a prince, though he should be sub- 
ject to the common frailties attached to men and to princes, 
though he should have once thought it necessary to provide 
force against the desperate designs manifestly carrying on 
against his person and the remnants of his authority,— 
though all this should be taken into consideration, I shall 
be led with great difficulty to think he deserves the cruel and 
insulting triumph of Paris, and of Dr. Price. I tremble for 
the cause of liberty, from such an example to kings. I trem- 
ble for the cause of humanity, inthe unpunished outrages of 
the most wicked of mankind. But there are some people of 
that low and degenerate fashion of mind that they look up 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 437 


with a sort of complacent awe and admiration to kings who 
know to keep firm in their seat, to hold a strict hand over 
their subjects, to assert their prerogative, and, by the awak- 
ened vigilance of a severe despotism, to guard against the 
very first approaches of freedom. Against such as these ~ 
they never elevate their voice. Deserters from principle, 
listed with fortune, they never see any good in suffering 
virtue, nor any crime in prosperous usurpation. 

If it could have been made clear to me that the king and 
queen of France (those, I mean, who were such before the 
triumph) were inexorable and cruel tyrants, that they had 
formed a deliberate scheme for massacring the National As- 
sembly, (I think I have seen something like the latter insin- 
uated in certain publications,) I should think their captivity 
just. If this be true, much more ought to have been done, 
butdone, in my opinion, in another manner. The punish- 
ment of real tyrants is a noble and awful act of justice ; and 
it has with truth been said to be consolatory to the human 
mind. Butif I were to punish a wicked king, I should regard 
the dignity in avenging the crime. Justice is grave and de- 
corous, and in its punishments rather seems to submit toa 
necessity than to make a choice. Had Nero, or Agrippina, 
or Louis the Eleventh, or Charles the Ninth been the sub- 
ject,—if Charles the Twelfth of Sweden, after the murder of 
Patkul, or his predecessor, Christina, after the murder of 
Monaldeschi, had fallen into your hands, Sir, or into mine, I 
am sure our conduct would have been different. 

If the French king, or king of the French, (or by what- 
ever name he is known in the new vocabulary of your 
Constitution,) has in his own person and that of his queen 
really deserved these unavowed, but unavenged, murderous 
attempts, and those frequent indignities more cruel than 
murder, such a person would ill-deserve even that subordi- 
nate executory trust which I understand is to be placed in 
him; nor is he fit to be called chief in a nation which he has 
outraged and oppressed. A worse choice for such an office 
in a new commonwealth than that of a deposed tyrant could 


438 BURKE 


not possibly be made. But to degrade and insult a man as 
the worst of criminals, and afterwards to trust him in your 
highest concerns, as a faithful, honest, and zealous servant, is 
not consistent in reasoning, nor prudent in policy, nor safe 
in practice. Those who could make such an appointment 
must be guilty of a more flagrant breach of trust than any 
they have yet committed against the people. As this is the 
only crime in which your leading politicians could have 
acted inconsistently, I conclude that there is no sort of 
sround for these horrid insinuations. I think no better of 
all the other calumnies. 

In England, we give no credit to them. We are generous 
enemies; we are faithful allies. We spurn from us with 
disgust and indignation the slanders of those who bring us 
their anecdotes with the attestation of the flower-de-luce on 
their shoulder. We have Lord George Gordon fast in New- 
gate; and neither his being a public proselyte to Judaism, 
nor his having, in his zeal against Catholic priests and all 
sorts of ecclesiastics, raised a mob (excuse the term, it is still 
in use here) which pulled down all our prisons, have pre- 
served to him a liberty of which he did not render himself 
worthy by a virtuous use of it. We have rebuilt Newgate, 
and tenanted the mansion. We have prisons almost as 
strong as the Bastile, for those who dare to libel the queens 
of France. In this spiritual retreat let the noble libeller 
remain. Let him there meditate on his Talmud, until he 
learns a conduct more becoming his birth and parts, and not 
so disgraceful to the ancient religion to which he has become 
a proselyte,—or until some persons from your side of the 
water, to please your new Hebrew brethren, shall ransom 
him. He may then be enabled to purchase, with the old 
hoards of the synagogue, and a very small poundage on the 
long compound interest of the thirty pieces of silver, (Dr. 
Price has shown us what miracles compound interest will 
perform in 1790 years,) the lands which are lately discovered 
to have been usurped by the Gallican Church. Send us your 
Popish Archbishop of Paris, and we will send you our Prot- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 439 


estant Rabbin. We shall treat the person you send us in 
exchange like a gentleman and an honest man, as he is: but 
pray let him bring with him the fund of his hospitality, 
bounty, and charity ; and, depend upon it, we shall never con- 
fiscate a shilling of that honourable and pious fund, nor think 
of enriching the Treasury with the spoils of the poor-box. 
To tell you the truth, my dear Sir, I think the honour of 
our nation to be somewhat concerned in the disclaimer of 
the proceedings of this society of the Old Jewry and the 
London Tavern. I have no man’s proxy. I speak only 
from myself, when I disclaim, as I do with all possible ear- 
nestness, all communion with the actors in that triumph, or 
with the admirers of it. When I assert anything else, as 
concerning the people of England, I speak from observa- 
tion, not from authority ; but I speak from the experience 
I have had in a pretty extensive and mixed communication 
with the inhabitants of this kingdom, of all descriptions and 
ranks, and after a course of attentive observation, begun in 
early life, and continued for near forty years. I have often 
been astonished, considering that we are divided from you 
but by a slender dike of about twenty-four miles, and that 
the mutual intercourse between the two countries has lately 
been very great, to find how little you seem to know of us. 
I suspect that this is owing to your forming a judgment of 
_ this nation from certain publications, which do, very errone- 
ously, if they do at all, represent the opinions and disposi- 
tions generally prevalent in England. The vanity, restless- 
ness, petulance, and spirit of intrigue of several petty cabals, 
who attempt to hide their total want of consequence in 
bustle and noise, and puffing and mutual quotation of each 
other, makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect of 
their abilities is a general mark of acquiescence in their opin- 
ions. No such thing, I assure you. Because half a dozen 
grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their 
importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle reposed 
beneath the shadow of the British oak chew the cud and are 
silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise 


440 BURKE 


are the only inhabitants of the field,—that, of course, they 
are many in number,—or that, after all, they are other than 
the little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and 
troublesome insects of the hour. 

I almost venture to affirm that not one in a hundred 
amongst us participates in the “triumph” of the Revolu- 
tion Society. If the king and queen of France and their 
children were to fall into our hands by the chance of war, in 
the most acrimonious of all hostilities, (I deprecate such an 
event, I deprecate such hostility,) they would be treated 
with another sort of triumphal entry into London. We 
formerly have had a king of France in that situation: you 
have read how he was treated by the victor in the field, and 
in what manner he was afterwards received in England. 
Four hundred years have gone over us; but I believe we 
are not materially changed since that period. Thanks to 
our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold slug- 
gishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp 
of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the 
generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth cen- 
tury; nor as yet have we subtilised ourselves into savages. 
We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disci- 
ples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst 
us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our 
lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries, 
and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in moral- 
ity,—nor many in the great principles of government, nor in 
the ideas of liberty, which were understood long before we 
were born altogether as well as they will be after the grave 
has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent 
tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity. In 
England we have not yet been completely embowelled of 
our natural entrails: we still feel within us, and we cherish 
and cultivate, those inbred sentiments which are the faithful 
guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true support- 
ers of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been 
drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 441 


birds in a museum, with chaff and rags, and paltry, blurred 
shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the 
whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated 
by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh 
and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look 
up with awe to kings, with affection to Parliaments, with 
duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with re- 
spect to nobility.1% Why? Because, when such ideas are 
brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected ; 
because all other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to 
corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render 
us unfit for rational liberty, and, by teaching us a servile, 
licentious, and abandoned insolence, to be our low sport for 
a few holidays, to make us perfectly fit for and justly deserv- 
ing of slavery through the whole course of our lives. 

You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough 
to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings: 
that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we 
cherish them to a very considerable degree; and, to take 
more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are 
prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more 
generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. 
We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own 
private stock of reason; because we suspect that the stock 
in each man is small, and that the individuals would do 
better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of 
nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, in- 
stead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity 
to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If 
they find what they seek (and they seldom fail), they think 
it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason in- 
volved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave 
nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its 
reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an af- 
fection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready 
application in the emergency; it previously engages the 
mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not 


A42 BURKE 


leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skep- 
tical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s 
virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. 
Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his 
nature. 

Your literary men, and your politicians, and so do the 
whole clan of the enlightened among us, essentially differ 
in these points. They have no respect for the wisdom of 
others; but they pay it off by a very full measure of con- 
fidence in theirown. With them it is a sufficient motive to 
destroy an old scheme of things, because it is an old one. 
As to the new, they are in no sort of fear with regard to the 
duration of a building run up in haste; because duration is 
no object to those who think little or nothing has been done 
before their time, and who place all their hopes in discovery. 
They conceive, very systematically, that all things which 
give perpetuity are mischievous, and therefore they are at 
inexpiable war with all establishments. They think that 
government may vary like modes of dress, and with as little 
ill effect ; that there needs no principle of attachment, except 
a sense of present conveniency, to any constitution of the 
state. They always speak as if they were of opinion that 
there is a singular species of compact between them and 
their magistrates, which binds the magistrate, but which has 
nothing reciprocal in it, but that the majesty of the people 
has a right to dissolve it without any reason but its will. 
Their attachment to their country itself is only so far as it 
agrees with some of their fleeting projects: it begins and 
ends with that scheme of polity which falls in with their 
momentary opinion. 

These doctrines, or rather sentiments, seem prevalent with 
your new statesmen. But they are wholly different from 
those on which we have always acted in this country. 

I hear it is sometimes given out in France, that what is 
doing among you is after the example of England. I beg 
leave to affirm that scarcely anything done with you has 
originated from the practice or the prevalent opinions of 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 443 


this people, either in the act or in the spirit of the proceed- 
ing. Let me add, that we are as unwilling to learn these 
lessons from France as we are sure that we never taught 
them to that nation. The cabals here who take a sort of 
share in your transactions as yet consist of but a handful of 
people. If, unfortunately, by their intrigues, their sermons, 
their publications, and by a confidence derived from an ex- 
pected union with the counsels and forces of the French 
nation, they should draw considerable numbers into their 
faction, and in consequence should seriously attempt any- 
thing here in imitation of what has been done with you, the 
event, I dare venture to prophesy, will be, that, with some 
trouble to their country, they will soon accomplish their own 
destruction. This people refused to change their law in 
remote ages from respect to the infallibility of Popes, and 
they will not now alter it from a pious implicit. faith in the 
dogmatism of philosophers,—though the former was armed 
with the anathema and crusade, and though the latter should 
act with the libel and the lamp-iron. 

Formerly your affairs were your own concern only. We 
felt for them as men; but we keep aloof from them, because 
we were not citizens of France. But when we see the model 
held up to ourselves, we must feel as Englishmen, and, feel- 
ing, we must provide as Englishmen. Your affairs, in spite 
of us, are made a part of our interest,—so far at least as to 
keep at a distance your panacea or your plague. If it bea 
panacea, we do not want it: we know the consequences of 
unnecessary physic. If it be a plague, it is such a plague 
that the precautions of the most severe quarantine ought to 
be established against it. 

I hear on all hands, that a cabal, calling itself philosophic, 
receives the glory of many of the late proceedings, and that 
their opinions and systems are the true actuating spirit of 
the whole of them. I have heard of no party in England, 
literary or political, at any time, known by such a descrip- 
tion. It is not with you composed of those men, is it? 
whom the vulgar, in their blunt, homely style, commonly 


444 BURKE 


call Atheists and Infidels? If it be, I admit that we, too, 
have had writers of that description, who made some noise 
in their day. At present they repose in lasting oblivion. 
Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of 
Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, 
and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers ? 
Who now reads Bolingbroke ? Who ever read him through? 
Ask the booksellers of London what is become of all these 
lights of the world. In as few years their few successors 
will go to the family vault of “all the Capulets.” But 
whatever they were, or are, with us they were and are wholly 
unconnected individuals. With us they kept the common 
nature of their kind, and were not gregarious. They never 
acted in corps, nor were known as a faction in the state, nor 
presumed to influence in that name or character, or for the 
purposes of such a faction, on any of our public concerns. 
Whether they ought so to exist, and so be permitted to act, 
is another question. As such cabals have not existed in 
England, so neither has the spirit of them had any influence 
in establishing the original frame of our Constitution, or in 
any one of the several reparations and improvements it has 
undergone. The whole has been done under the auspices, 
and is confirmed by the sanctions, of religion and piety. 
The whole has emanated from the simplicity of our national 
character, and from a sort of native plainness and directness 
of understanding, which for a long time characterized those 
men who have successively obtained authority among us. 
This disposition still remains,—at least in the great body of 
the people. 

We know, and, what is better, we feel inwardly, that re- 
ligion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all 
good, and of all comfort. In England we are so convinced 
of this, that there is no rust of superstition, with which the 
accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted 
it over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred of 
the people of England would not prefer to impiety. We 
shall never be such fools as to call in an enemy to the sub- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 445 


stance of any system to remove its corruptions, to supply its 
defects, or to perfect its construction. If our religious tenets 
should ever want a further elucidation, we shall not call on 
Atheism to explainthem. We shall not light up our temple 
from that unhallowed fire. It will be illuminated with other 
lights. It will be perfumed with other incense than the 
infectious stuff which is imported by the smugglers of adul- 
terated metaphysics. If our ecclesiastical establishment 
should want a revision, it is not avarice or rapacity, public 
or private, that we shall employ for the audit or receipt or 
application of its consecrated revenue. Violently condemn- 
ing neither the Greek nor the Armenian, nor, since heats are 
subsided, the Roman system of religion, we prefer the Prot- 
estant: not because we think it has less of the Christian 
religion in it, but because, in our judgment, it has more. 
Weare Protestants, not from indifference, but from zeal. 

We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his 
constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not 
only our reason, but our instincts ; and that it can not prevail 
long. But if, in the moment of riot, and in a drunken delir- 
ium from the hot spirit drawn out of the alembic of hell, 
which in France is now so furiously boiling, we should 
uncover our nakedness, by throwing off that Christian relig- 
ion which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one 
great source of civilization amongst us, and among many 
other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that 
the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, perni- 
cious, and degrading superstition might take place of it. 

For that reason, before we take from our establishment 
the natural, human means of estimation, and give it up to 
contempt, as you have done, and in doing it have incurred 
the penalties you well deserve to suffer, we desire that some 
other may be presented to us in the place of it. We shall 
then form our judgment. 

On these ideas, instead of quarrelling with establishments, 
as some do, who have made a philosophy and a religion of 
their hostility to such institutions, we cleave closely to them, 


446 BURKE 


Weare resolved to keep an established church, an established 
monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established de- 
mocracy, each in the degree it exists, and in no greater. lI 
shall show you presently how much of each of these we 
possess. 

It has been the misfortune (not, as these gentlemen think 
it, the glory) of this age, that everything is to be discussed, 
as if the Constitution of our country were to be always a 
subject rather of altercation than enjoyment. For this rea- 
son, as well as for the satisfaction of those among you (if 
any such you have among you) who may wish to profit of 
examples, I venture to trouble you with a few thoughts upon 
each of these establishments. I do not think they were un- 
wise in ancient Rome, who, when they wished to new-model 
their laws, sent commissioners to examine the best-con- 
stituted republics within their reach. 


First I beg leave to speak of our Church Establishment, 
which is the first of our prejudices,—not a prejudice destitute 
of reason, but involving in it profound and extensive wisdom. 
I speak of it first. It is first, and last, and midst in our minds. 
For, taking ground on that religious system of which we are 
now in possession, we continue to act on the early received 
and uniformly continued sense of mankind. That sense not 
only, like a wise architect, hath built up the august fabric of 
states, but, like a provident proprietor, to preserve the struc- 
ture from profanation and ruin, as a sacred temple, purged 
from all the impurities of fraud and violence and injustice 
and tyranny, hath solemnly and forever consecrated the com- 
monwealth, and all that officiate in it. This consecration is 
made, that all who administer in the government of men, in 
which they stand in the person of God Himself, should have 
high and worthy notions of their function and destination ; 
that their hope should be full of immortality; that they 
should not look to the paltry pelf of the moment, nor to the 
temporary and transient praise of the vulgar, but to a solid, 
permanent existence, in the permanent part of their nature, 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 447 


and to a permanent fame and glory, in the example they 
leave as a rich inheritance to the world. 

Such sublime principles ought to be infused into per- 
sons of exalted situations, and religious establishments 
provided that may continully revive and enforce them. 
Every sort of moral, every sort of civil, every sort of politic 
institution, aiding the rational and natural ties that connect 
the human understanding and affections to the divine, are 
not more than necessary, in order to build up that wonder- 
ful structure, Man,— whose prerogative it is, to be in a great 
degree a creature of his own making, and who, when made 
as he ought to be made, is destined to hold no trivial place 
in the creation. But whenever man is put over men, as the 
better nature ought ever to preside, in that case more partic- 
ularly he should as nearly as possible be approximated to 
his perfection. 

The consecration of the state by a state religious establish- 
ment is necessary also to operate with a wholesome awe 
upon free citizens; because, in order to secure their freedom, 
they must enjoy some determinate portionof power. To 
them, therefore, a religion connected with the state, and 
with their duty towards it, becomes even more necessary 
than in such societies where the people, by the terms of their 
subjection, are confined to private sentiments, and the man- 
agement of their own family concerns. All persons possess- 
ing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully im- 
pressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are 
to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great 
Master, Author, and Founder of society. 

This principle ought even to be more strongly impressed 
upon the minds of those who compose the collective sover- 
eignty than upon those of single princes. Without instru- 
ments, these princes can do nothing. Whoever uses instru- 
ments, in finding helps, finds also impediments. Their 
power is therefore by no means complete ; norare they safe 
in extreme abuse. Such persons, however elevated by 
flattery, arrogance, and self-opinion, must be sensible, that, 


448 BURKE 


whether covered or not by positive law, in some way or other 
they are accountable even here for the abuse of their trust. 
If they are not cut off by a rebellion of their people, they 
may be strangled by the very janissaries kept for their 
security against all other rebellion. Thus we have seen the 
king of France sold by his soldiers for an increase of pay. 
But where popular authority is absolute and unrestrained, 
the people have an infinitely greater, because a far better 
founded, confidence in their own power. They are them- 
selves in a great measure their own instruments. They are 
nearer to their objects. Besides, they are less under re- 
sponsibility to one of the greatest controlling powers on 
earth, the sense of fame and estimation. The share of in- 
famy that is likely to fall to the lot of each individual in 
public acts is small indeed: the operation of opinion being in 
the inverse ratio to the number of those who abuse power. 
Their own approbation of their own acts has to them the 
appearance of a public judgment in their favour. A perfect 
democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the 
world. As it is the most shameless, it is also the most fear- 
less. No man apprehends in his person that he can be 
made subject to punishment. Certainly the people at large 
never ought: for, as all punishments are for example towards 
the conservation of the people at large, the people at large 
can never become the subject of punishment by any human 
hand. It is therefore of infinite importance that they 
should not be suffered to imagine that their will, any more 
than that of kings, is the standard of right and wrong. 
They ought to be persuaded that they are full as little en- 
titled, and far less qualified, with safety to themselves, to 
use any arbitrary power whatsoever; that therefore they are 
not, under a false show of liberty, but in truth to exercise 
an unnatural, inverted domination, tyrannically to exact 
from those who officiate in the state, not an entire devotion 
to their interest, which is their right, but an abject submis- 
sion to their occasional will: extinguishing thereby, in all 
those who serve them, all moral principle, all sense of dignity, 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 449 


all use of judgment, and all consistency of character; whilst 
by the very same process they give themselves up a proper, 
a suitable, but a most contemptible prey to the servile ambi- 
tion of popular sycophants or courtly flatterers. 

When the people have emptied themselves of all the lust 
of selfish will, which without religion it is utterly impossible 
they ever should,—when they are conscious that they exer- 
cise, and exercise perhaps ina higher link of the order of 
delegation, the power which to be legitimate must be accord- 
ing to that eternal, immutable law in which will and reason 
are the same,—they will be more careful how they place 
power in base and incapable hands. In their nomination to 
office, they will not appoint to the exercise of authority as 
to a pitiful job, but as to a holy function; not according to 
their sordid, selfish interest, nor to their wanton caprice, nor 
to their arbitrary will; but they will confer that power 
(which any man may well tremble to give or to receive) on 
those only in whom they may discern that predominant pro- 
portion of active virtue and wisdom, taken together and 
fitted to the charge, such as in the great and inevitable 
mixed mass of human imperfections and infirmities is to be 
found. | 

When they are habitually convinced that no evil can be 
acceptable, either in the act or the permission, to Him whose 
essence is good, they will be better able to extirpate out of 
the minds of all magistrates, civil, ecclesiastical, or military, 
anything that bears the least resemblance to a proud and 
lawless domination. 

But one of the first and most leading principles on which 
the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated is lest the 
temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of 
what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is 
due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire 
masters ; that they should not think it amongst their rights 
to cut off the entail or commit waste on the inheritance, by 
destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their 
society : hazarding to leave to those who come after them a 

29 


450 BURKE 


ruin instead of an habitation,—and teaching these successors 
as little to respect their contrivances as they had themselves 
respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this un- 
principled facility of changing the state as often and as much 
and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, 
the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would 
be broken; no one generation could link with the other; 
men would become little better than the flies of a summer. 
And first of all, the science of jurisprudence, the pride of 
the human intellect, which, with all its defects, redundancies, 
and errors, is the collected reason of ages, combining the 
principles of original justice with the infinite variety of 
human concerns, as a heap of old exploded errors, would be 
no longer studied. Personal self-sufficiency and arrogance 
(the certain attendants upon all those who have never ex- 
perienced a wisdom greater than their own) would usurp 
the tribunal. Of course no certain laws, establishing invari- 
able grounds of hope and fear, would keep the actions of 
men in a certain course, or direct them to a certain end. 
Nothing stable in the modes of holding property or exercis- 
ing function could form asolid ground on which any parent 
could speculate in the education of his offspring, or in a 
choice for their future establishment in the world. No 
principles would be early worked into the habits. As soon 
as the most able instructor had completed his laborious 
course of institution, instead of sending forth his pupil ac- 
complished in a virtuous discipline fitted to procure him at- 
tention and respect in his place in society, he would find 
everything altered, and that he had turned out a poor 
creature to the contempt and derision of the world, ignorant 
of the true grounds of estimation. Who would insure a 
tender and delicate sense of honour to beat almost with the 
first pulses of the heart, when no man could know what 
would be the test of honourin a nation continually varying the 
standard of its coin? No part of life wold retain its acquisi- 
tions. Barbarism with regard to science and literature, unskil- 
fulness with regard to arts and manufactures, would infallibly 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 451 


succeed to the want of a steady education and settled 
principle ; and thus the commonwealth itself would in a few 
generations crumble away, be disconnected into the dust and 
powder of individuality, and at length dispersed to all the 
winds of heaven. 

To avoid, therefore, the evils of inconstancy and versatility, 
ten thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the 
blindest prejudice, we have consecrated the state, that no 
man should approach to look into its defects or corruptions 
but with due caution; that he should never dream of begin- 
ning its reformation by its subversion; that he should 
approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds of a 
father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude. By this wise 
prejudice we are taught to look with horror on those children 
of their country who are prompt rashly to hack that aged 
parent in pieces and put him into the kettle of magicians, in 
hopes that by their poisonous weeds and wild incantations 
they may regenerate the paternal constitution and renovate 
their father’s life. 

Society is, indeed, a contract. Subordinate contracts for 
objects of mere occasional interest may be dissolved at 
pleasure ; but the state ought not to be considered as noth- 
ing better than a partnership agreement in a tradeof pep- 
per and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low 
concern, to be taken up fora little temporary interest, and 
to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be 
looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partner- 
ship in things subservient only to the gross animal existence 
of atemporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in 
all science, a partnershipin all art, a partnership in every 
virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partner- 
ship cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a 
partnership not only between those who are living, but be- 
tween those who are living, those who are dead, and those who 
aretobe born. Each contract of each particular state is buta 
clause in the great primeval contract of eternal society, link- 
ing the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible 


A452 BURKE 


and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned 
by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral 
natures each in their appointed place. This law is not 
subject to the will of those who, by an obligation above 
them, and infinitely superior, are bound to submit their will 
to that law. The municipal corporations of that universal 
kingdom are not morally at liberty, at their pleasure, and 
on their speculations of a contingent improvement, wholly 
to separate and tear asunder the bands of their subordinate 
community, and to dissolve it into an unsocial, uncivil, un- 
connected chaos of elementary principles. It is the first 
and supreme necessity only, a necessity that is not chosen, 
but chooses, a necessity paramount to deliberation, that 
admits no discussion and demands no evidence, which 
alone can justify a resort to anarchy. This necessity is no 
exception to the rule ; because this necessity itself is a part, 
too, of that moral and physical disposition of things to 
which man must be obedient by consent or force: but if 
that which is only submission to necessity should be made 
the object of choice, the law is broken, Nature is disobeyed, 
and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled, from 
this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and 
fruitful penitence, into the antagonist world of madness, dis- 
cord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow. 

These, my dear Sir, are, were, and, I think, long will be, 
the sentiments of not the least learned and reflecting part of 
this kingdom. They who are included in this description 
form their opinions on such grounds as such persons ought 
to form them. The less inquiring receive them from an 
authority which those whom Providence dooms to live on 
trust need not be ashamed to rely on. These two sorts of 
men move in the same direction, though in a different place. 
They both move with the order of the universe. They all 
know or feel this great ancient truth :—“ Quod illi principi et 
prepotenti Deo qui omnem hunc mundum regit nihil eorum 
quz quidem fiant in terris acceptius quam concilia et cztus 
hominum jure sociati que civitates appellantur.” They take 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 453 


this tenet of the head and heart, not from the great name which 
it immediately bears, nor from the greater from whence it is 
derived, but from that which alone can give true weight and 
sanction to any learned opinion, the common nature and com- 
mon relation of men. Persuaded that allthings ought to be 
done with reference, and referring all to the point of reference 
to which all should be directed, they think themselves bound, 
not only as individuals in the sanctuary of the heart, or as 
congregated in that personal capacity, to renew the memory 
of their high origin and cast, but also in their corporate 
character to perform their national homage to the Institutor 
and Author and Protector of civil society, without which 
civil society man could not by any possibility arrive at the 
perfection of which nature is capable, nor even make a 
remote and faint approach to it. They conceive that He 
who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue willed al- 
so the necessary means of its perfection: He willed there- 
fore, the state: He willed its connection with the source 
and original archetype of all perfection. They who are 
convinced of this His will, which is the law of laws and the 
sovereign of sovereigns, can not think it reprehensible that 
this our corporate fealty and homage, that this our recogni- 
tion of a signiory paramount, I had almost said this oblation 
of the state itself, as a worthy offering on the high altar of 
universal praise, should be performed, as all public, solemn 
acts are performed, in buildings, in music, in decoration, in 
speech, in the dignity of persons according to the customs of 
mankind, taught by their nature,—that is, with modest 
splendour, with unassuming state, with mild majesty and 
sober pomp. For those purposes they think some part of the 
wealth of thecountry is as usefully employed as it can be in 
fomenting the luxury of individuals. It is the public orna- 
ment. It is the public consolation. It nourishes the public 
hope. The poorest man finds his own importance and dignity 
in it, whilst the wealth and pride of individuals at every 
moment makes the man of humble rank and fortune sensible 
of his inferiority, and degrades and vilifies hiscondition. It 


AS4 BURKE 


is for the man in humble life, and to raise his nature, and to 
put him in mind of a state in which the privileges of opulence 
will cease, when he will be equal by nature, and may be 
more than equal by virtue, that this portion of the general 
wealth of his country is employed and sanctified. 

I assure you I do not aim at singularity. I give you op- 
inions which have been accepted amongst us, from very 
early times to this moment, with a continued and general ap- 
probation, and which, indeed, are so worked into my mind 
that I am unable to distinguish what I have learned from 
others from the results of my own meditation. 

It is on some such principles that the majority of the 
people of England, far from thinking a religious national 
establishment unlawful, hardly think it lawful to be without 
one. In France you are wholly mistaken, if you do not be- 
lieve us above all other things attached to it, and beyond 
all other nations ; and when this people has acted unwisely 
and unjustifiably in its favour, (as in some instances they have 
done, most certainly), in their very errors you will at least 
discover their zeal. 

This principle runs through the whole system of their pol- 
ity. They do not consider their Church establishment as 
convenient, but as essential to their state: not asa thing 
heterogeneous and separable,—something added for accom- 
modation,—what they may either keep up or lay aside, ac- 
cording to their temporary ideas of convenience. They 
consider it as the foundation of their whole Constitution, 
with which, and with every part of which, it holds an indis- 
soluble union. Church and State are ideas inseparable in 
their minds, and scarcely is the one ever mentioned without 
mentioning the other. 

Our education is so formed as to confirm and fix this im- 
pression. Our education is in amanner wholly in the hands 
of ecclesiastics, and in all stages from infancy to manhood. 
Even when our youth, leaving schools and universities, enter 
that most important period of life which begins to link ex- 
perience and study together, and when with that view they 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 455 


visit other countries, instead of old domestics whom we have 
seen as governors to principal men from other parts, three- 
fourths of those who go abroad with our young nobility and 
gentlemen are ecclesiastics : not as austere masters, nor as 
mere followers ; but as friends and companions of a graver 
character, and not seldom persons as well born as themselves. 
With them, as relations, they most commonly keep upa 
close connection through life. By this connection we con- 
ceive that we attach our gentlemen to the Church ; and we 
liberalize the Church by an intercourse with the leading 
characters of the country. 

So tenacious are we of the old ecclesiastical modes and 
fashions of institution, that very little alteration has been 
made in them since the fourteenth or fifteenth century : 
adhering in this particular, as in all things else, to our old 
settled maxim, never entirely nor at once to depart from an- 
tiquity. We found these old institutions, on the whole, 
favourable to morality and discipline ; and we thought they 
were susceptible of amendment, without altering the 
ground. Wethought that they were capable of receiving 
and meliorating,and above all of preserving, the accessions 
of science and literature, as the order of Providence should 
successively produce them. And after all, with this Gothic 
and monkish education, (for such itis in the groundwork), 
we may put in our claim to as ample and as early a share in 
all the improvements in science, in arts, and in literature, 
which have illuminated and adorned the modern world, as 
any other nation in Europe: we think one main cause of 
this improvement was our not despising the patrimony of 
knowledge which was left us by our forefathers. 

It is from our attachment to a Church establishment, that 
the English nation did not think it wise to intrust that great 
fundamental interest of the whole to what they trust no part 
of their civil or military public service,—that is, to the un- 
steady and precarious contribution of individuals. They go 
further. They certainly never have suffered, and never will 
suffer, the fixed estate of the Church to be converted into a 


456 BURKE 


pension, to depend on the Treasury, and to be delayed, 
withheld, or perhaps to be extinguished by fiscal difficulties : 
which difficulties may sometimes be pretended for political 
purposes, and are in fact often brought on by the extravag- 
ance, negligence, and rapacity of politicians. The people of 
England think that they have constitutional motives, as 
well as religious, against any project of turning their indep- 
endent clergy into ecclesiastical pensioners of state. They 
tremble for their liberty, from the influence of a clergy depen- 
dent on the crown; they tremble for the public tranquillity 
from the disorders of a factious clergy, if it were made to 
depend upon any other than the crown. They therefore 
made their Church, like their king and their nobility, inde- 
pendent. 

From the united considerations of religion and constitu- 
tional policy, from their opinion of a duty to make a sure 
provision for the consolation of the feeble and the instruc- 
tion of the ignorant, they have incorporated and identified 
the estate of the Church with the mass of private property, 
of which the state is not the proprietor, either for use or 
dominion, but the guardian only and the regulator. They 
have ordained that the provision of this establishment might 
be as stable as the earth on which it stands, and should not 
fluctuate with the Euripus of funds and actions. 

The men of England, the men, I mean, of light and lead- 
ing in England, whose wisdom (if they have any) is open 
and direct, would be ashamed, as of a silly, deceitful trick, 
to profess any religion in name, which by their proceedings 
they appear to contemn. If by their conduct (the only 
language that rarely lies) they seemed to regard the great 
ruling principle of the moral and the natural world as a 
mere invention to keep the vulgar in obedience, they ap- 
prehend that by such a conduct they would defeat the 
politic purpose they have in view. They would find it dif- 
ficult to make others believe in a system to which they man- 
ifestly gave no credit themselves. The Christian statesmen 
of this land would, indeed, first provide for the multitude, 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 457 


because it is the multitude, and is therefore, as such, the 
first object in the ecclesiastical institution, and in all institu- 
tions. They have been taught that the circumstance of the 
Gospel’s being preached to the poor was one of the great 
tests of its true mission. They think, therefore, that those 
do not believe it who donot take care it should be preached 
to the poor. But as they know that charity is not confined 
to any one description, but ought to apply itself to all men 
who have wants, they are not deprived of a due and anxious 
sensation of pity to the distresses of the miserable great. 
They are not repelled, through a fastidious delicacy, at the 
stench of their arrogance and presumption, from a medicinal 
attention to their mental blotches and running sores. They 
are sensible that religious instruction is of more consequence 
to them than to any others: from the greatness of the temp- 
tation to which they are exposed; from the important 
consequences that attend their faults; from the contagion 
of their ill example; from the necessity of bowing down the 
stubborn neck of their pride and ambition to the yoke of 
moderation and virtue; froma consideration of the fat stupid- 
ity and gross ignorance concerning what imports men most 
to know, which prevails at courts, and at the head of armies, 
and in senates, as much as at the loom and in the field. 

The English people are satisfied, that to the great the con- 
solations of religion are as necessary as its instructions. 
They, too, are among the unhappy. They feel personal 
pain and domestic sorrow. In these they have no privilege, 
but are subject to pay their full contingent to the contribu- 
tions levied on mortality. They want this sovereign balm 
under their gnawing cares and anxieties, which, being less 
conversant about the limited wants of animal life, range 
without limit, and are diversified by infinite combinations in 
the wild and unbounded regions of imagination. Some 
charitable dole is wanting to these, our often very unhappy 
brethren, to fill the gloomy void that reigns in minds which 
have nothing on earth to hope or fear; something to relieve 
in the killing languor and over-laboured lassitude of those 


458 BURKE 


who have nothing to do; something to excite an appetite to 
existence in the palled satiety which attends on all pleasures 
which may be bought, where Nature is not left to her own 
process, where even desire is anticipated, and therefore 
fruition defeated by meditated schemes and contrivances of 
delight, and no interval, no obstacle, is interposed between 
the wish and the accomplishment. 

The people of England know how little influence the 
teachers of religion are likely to have with the wealthy and 
powerful of long standing, and how much less with the 
newly fortunate, if they appear in a manner no way assorted 
to those with whom they must associate, and over whom 
they must even exercise, in some cases, something like an 
authority. What must they think of that body of teachers, 
if they see it in no part above the establishment of their 
domestic servants? If the poverty were voluntary, there 
might be some difference. Strong instances of self-denial 
operate powerfully on our minds; and a man who has no 
wants has obtained great freedom and firmness, and even 
dignity. But as the mass of any description of men are but 
men, and their poverty can not be voluntary, that disrespect 
which attends upon all lay poverty will not depart from the 
ecclesiastical. Our provident Constitution has therefore 
taken care that those who are to instruct presumptuous 
ignorance, those who are to be censors over insolent vice, 
should neither incur their contempt nor live upon their 
alms; nor will it tempt the rich to a neglect of the true 
medicine of their minds. For these reasons, whilst we pro- 
vide first for the poor, and with a parental solicitude, we 
have not relegated religion (like something we were ashamed 
to show) to obscure municipalities or rustic villages. No! 
we will have her to exalt her mitred front in courts and par- 
liaments. We will have her mixed throughout the whole 
mass of life, and blended with all the classes of society. The 
people of England will show to the haughty potentates of 
the world, and to their talking sophisters, that a free, a 
generous, an informed nation honours the high magistrates 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 459 


of its Church; that it will not suffer the insolence of wealth 
and titles, or any other species of proud pretension, to look 
down with scorn upon what they look up to with reverence, 
nor presume to trample on that acquired personal nobility 
which they intend always to be, and which often is, the 
fruit, not the reward, (for what can be the reward ?) of learn- 
ing, piety, and virtue. They can see, without pain or grudg- 
ing, an archbishop precede a duke. They can see a bishop 
of Durham ora bishop of Winchester in possession of ten 
thousand pounds a year, and can not conceive why it is in 
worse hands than estates to the like amount in the hands of 
this earl or that squire; although it may be true that so 
many dogs and horses arenot kept by the former, and fed 
with the victuals which ought to nourish the children of the 
people. It is true, the whole Church revenue is not always 
employed, and to every shilling, in charity; nor perhaps 
ought it; but something is generally so employed. It is 
better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to 
free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt 
to make men mere machines and instruments of a political 
benevolence. The world onthe whole will gain by a liberty 
without which virtue can not exist. 

When once the commonwealth has established the estates 
of the Church as property, it can consistently hear nothing 
of the more or the less. Too much and too little are treason 
against property. What evil can arise from the quantity in 
any hand, whilst the supreme authority has the full, sovereign 
superintendence over this, as over any property, to prevent 
every species of abuse,—and whenever it notably deviates, 
to give to it a direction agreeable to the purposes of its 
institution ? 

In England most of us conceive that it is envy and malig- 
nity towards those who are often the beginners of their own 
fortune, and not a love of the self-denial and mortification of 
the ancient Church, that makes some look askance at the 
distinctions and honours and revenues which, taken from no 
person, are set apart for virtue. The ears of the people of 


460 BURKE 


England are distinguishing. They hear these men speak 
broad. Their tongue betrays them. Their language is in 
the patois of fraud, in the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy. 
The people of England must think so, when these praters 
affect to carry back the clergy to that primitive evangelic 
poverty which in the spirit ought always to exist in them, 
(and in us, too, however we may like it,) but in the thing 
must be varied, when the relation of that body to the state 
is altered,— when manners, when modes of life, when indeed 
the whole order of human affairs, has undergone a total 
revolution. We shall believe those reformers to be then 
honest enthusiasts, not, as now we think them, cheats and 
deceivers, when we see them throwing their own goods into 
common, and submitting their own persons to the austere 
discipline of the early Church. 

With these ideas rooted in their minds, the Commons of 
Great Britain, in the national emergencies, will never seek 
their resource from the confiscation of the estates of the 
Church and poor. Sacrilege and proscription are not among 
the ways and means of our Committee of Supply. The Jews 
in Change Alley have not yet dared to hint their hopes of a 
mortgage on the revenues belonging to the see of Canter- 
bury. I am not afraid that I shall be disavowed, when I 
assure you that there is not one public man in this kingdom, 
whom you wish to quote,—no, not one, of any party or 
description,—who does not reprobate the dishonest, perfid- 
ious and cruel confiscation which the National Assembly has 
been compelled to make of that property which it was their 
first duty to protect. 

It is with the exultation of a little national pride I tell you 
that those amongst us who have wished to pledge the socie- 
ties of Paris in the cup of their abominations have been dis- 
appointed. The robbery of your Church has proved a secu- 
rity to the possessions of ours. It has roused the people. 
They see with horror and alarm that enormous and shame- 
less act of proscription. It has opened, and will more and 
more open, their eyes upon the selfish enlargement of mind 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 461 


and the narrow liberality of sentiment of insidious men, 
which, commencing in close hypocrisy and fraud, have ended 
in open violence and rapine. At home we behold similar 
beginnings, We are on our guard against similar conclu- 
sions. 

I hope we shall never be so totally lost to all sense of the 
duties imposed upon us by the law of social union, as, upon 
any pretext of public service, to confiscate the goods of a 
single unoffending citizen. Who but a tyrant (a name ex- 
pressive of everything which can vitiate and degrade human 
nature) could think of seizing on the property of men, unac- 
cused, unheard, untried, by whole descriptions, by hundreds 
and thousands together? Who that had not lost every trace 
of humanity could think of casting down men of exalted 
rank and sacred function, some of them of an age to call at 
once for reverence and compassion,—of casting them down 
from the highest situation in the commonwealth, wherein 
they were maintained by their own landed property, to a 
state of indigence, depression, and contempt ? 

The confiscators truly have made some allowance to their 
victims from the scraps and fragments of their own tables, 
from which they have been so harshly driven, and which 
have been so bountifully spread for a feast to the harpies of 
usury. But to drive men from independence to live on 
alms is itself great cruelty. That which might be a tolerable 
condition to men in one state of life, and not habituated to 
other things, may, when all these circumstances are altered, 
be a dreadful revolution, and one to which a virtuous mind 
would feel pain in condemning any guilt, except that which 
would demand the life of the offender. But to many minds 
this punishment of degradation and infamy is worse than 
death. Undoubtedly it is an infinite aggravation of this 
cruel suffering, that the persons who were taught a double 
prejudice in favour of religion, by education, and by the place 
they held in the administration of its functions, are to receive 
the remnants of their property as alms from the profane and 
impious hands of those who had plundered them of all the 


462 BURKE 


rest,—to receive (if they are at all to receive) not from the 
charitable contributions of the faithful, but from the insolent 
tenderness of known and avowed atheism, the maintenance 
of religion, measured out to them on the standard of the 
contempt in which it is held, and for the purpose of render- 
ing those who receive the allowance vile and of no estima- 
tion in the eyes of mankind. 

But this act of seizure of property, it seems, is a judgment 
in law, and not a confiscation. They have, it seems, found 
out in the academies of the Palais Royal and the Jacobins, 
that certain men had no right to the possessions which they 
held under law, usage, the decisions of courts, and the accumu- 
lated prescription of a thousand years, They say that eccle- 
siastics are fictitious persons, creatures of the state, whom at 
pleasure they may destroy, and of course limit and modify 
in every particular; that the goods they possess are not prop- 
erly theirs, but belong to the state which created the fiction ; 
and we are therefore not to trouble ourselves with what they 
may suffer in their natural feelings and natural persons on 
account of what is done towards them in this their construc- 
tive character. Of what import is it, under what names you 
injure men, and deprive them of the just emoluments of a 
profession in which they were not only permitted, but en- 
couraged by the state to engage, and upon the supposed cer- 
tainty of which emoluments they had formed the plan of their 
lives, contracted debts, and led multitudes to an entire de- 
pendence upon them ? 

You do not imagine, Sir, that I am going to compliment 
this miserable distinction of persons with any long discus- 
sion. The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its 
force is dreadful. Had not your confiscators by their early 
crimes obtained a power which secures indemnity to all the 
crimes of which they have since been guilty, or that they can 
commit, it is not the syllogism of the logician, but the lash 
of the executioner, that would have refuted a sophistry 
which becomes an accomplice of theft and murder. The so- 
phistic tyrants of Paris are loud in their declamations against 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 463 


the departed regal tyrants who in former ages have vexed 
the world. They are thus bold, because they are safe from 
the dungeons and iron cages of their old masters. Shall we 
be more tender of the tyrants of our own time, when we see 
them acting worse tragedies under our eyes? Shall we not 
use the same liberty that they do, when we can use it with 
the same safety, when to speak honest truth only requires a 
contempt of the opinions of those whose actions we abhor? 

This outrage on all the rights of property was at first cov- 
ered with what, on the system of their conduct, was the most 
astonishing of all pretexts,—a regard to national faith. The 
enemies to property at first pretended a most tender, deli- 
cate, and scrupulous anxiety for keeping the king’s engage- 
ments with the public creditor. These professors of the rights 
of men are so busy in teaching others, that they have not 
leisure to learn anything themselves ; otherwise they would 
have known that it is to the property of the citizen, and not 
to the demands of the creditor of the state, that the first and 
original faith of civil society is pledged. The claim of the 
citizen is prior in time, paramount in title, superior in equity. 
The fortunes of individuals, whether possessed by acquisi- 
tion, or by descent, or in virtue of a participation in the 
goods of some community, were no part of the creditor’s 
security, expressed orimplied. They never so much as en- 
tered into his head, when he made his bargain. He well 
knew that the public, whether represented by a monarch or 
by asenate, can pledge nothing but the public estate ; and 
it can have no public estate, except in what it derives from 
a just and proportioned imposition upon the citizens at large. 
This was engaged, and nothing else could be engaged, to the 
public creditor. No man can mortgage his injustice as a 
pawn for his fidelity. 

It is impossible to avoid some observation on the con- 
tradictions caused by the extreme rigor and the extreme 
laxity of this new public faith, which influenced in this trans- 
action, and which influenced not according to the nature of 
the obligation, but to the description of the persons to whom 


464 BURKE 


it was engaged. No acts of the old government of the kings 
of France are held valid in the National Assembly, except 
its pecuniary engagements: acts of all others of the most 
ambiguous legality. The rest of the acts of that royal gov- 
ernment are considered in so odious a light that to have a 
claim under its authority is looked on as a sort of crime. A 
pension, given as a reward for service to the state, is surely 
as good a ground of property as any security for money ad- 
vanced to the state. It is a better ; for money is paid, and 
well paid, to obtain that service. We have, however, seen 
multitudes of people under this description in France, who 
never had been deprived of their allowances by the most ar- 
bitrary ministers in the most arbitrary times, by this assem- 
bly of the rights of men robbed without mercy. They were 
told, inanswer to their claim to the bread earned with their 
blood, that their services had not been rendered to the coun- 
try that now exists. 

This laxity of public faith is not confined to those unfor- 
tunate persons. The Assembly, with perfect consistency, it 
must be owned, is engaged in a respectable deliberation how 
far it is bound by the treaties made with other nations un- 
der the former government; and their committee is to report 
which of them they ought to ratify, and which not. By this 
means they have put the external fidelity of this virgin state 
on a par with its internal. 

It is not easy to conceive upon what rational principle the 
royal governments should not, of the two, rather have pos- 
sessed the power of rewarding service and making treaties, 
in virtue of its prerogative, than that of pledging to creditors 
the revenue of the state, actual and possible. The treasure 
of the nation, of all things, has been the least allowed to the 
prerogative of the king of France, or to the prerogative of 
any king in Europe. To mortgage the public revenue im- 
plies the sovereign dominion, in the fullest sense, over the pub- 
lic purse. It goes far beyond the trust even of a temporary 
and occasional taxation. The acts, however, of that danger- 
ous power (the distinctive mark of a boundless despotism) 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 465 


have been alone held sacred. Whence arose this preference 
given by a democratic assembly to a body of property deriv- 
ing its title from the most critical and obnoxious of all the 
exertions of monarchical authority? Reason can furnish 
nothing to reconcile inconsistency ; nor can partial favour be 
acounted for upon equitable principles. But the contradiction 
and partiality whichadmit no justification are not the less 
without an adequate cause ; and that cause I do not think 
it difficult to discover. 

By the vast debt of France a great moneyed interest has 
insensibly grown up, and with it a great power. By the an- 
cient usages which prevailed in that kingdom, the general 
circulation of property, and in particular the mutual converti- 
bility of land into money and of money into land, had al- 
ways beena matter of difficulty. Family settlements, rather 
more general and more strict than they are in England, the 
jus retractis, the great mass of landed property held by the 
crown, and, by a maxim of the French law, held unalienably, 
the vast estates of the ecclesiastic corporations,—all these 
had kept the landed and moneyed interests more separated 
in France, less miscible, and the owners of the two distinct 
species of property not so well disposed to each other as 
they are in this country. 

The moneyed property was long looked on with rather an 
evil eye by the people. They saw it connected with their 
distresses, and aggravating them. It was no less envied by 
the old landed interests,—partly for the same reasons that 
rendered it obnoxious to the people, but much more so as it 
eclipsed, by the splendour of an ostentatious luxury, the un- 
endowed pedigrees and naked titles of several among the no- 
bility. Even when the nobility, which represented the more 
permanent landed interest, united themselves by marriage 
(which sometimes was the case) with the other description, 
the wealth which saved the family from ruin was supposed to 
contaminate and degrade it. Thus the enmities and heart- 
burnings of these parties were increased even by the usual 
means by which discord is made to cease and quarrels are 

30 


466 BURKE 


turned into friendship. In the meantime, the pride of the 
wealthy men, not noble, or newly noble, increased with its 
cause. They felt with resentment an inferiority the grounds 
of which they did not acknowledge. There was no measure 
to which they were not willing to lend themselves, in order to 
be revenged of the outrages of this rival pride, and to exalt 
their wealth to what they considered as its natural rank and es- 
timation. They struck at the nobility through the crown and 
the Church. They attacked them particularly on the side on 
which they thought them the most vulnerable,—that is, the 
possessions of the Church, which, through the patronage of 
the crown, generally devolved upon the nobility. The bish- 
oprics and the great commendatory abbeys were, with few 
exceptions, held by that order. 

In this state of real, though not always perceived, warfare 
between the noble ancient landed interest and the new mon- 
eyed interest, the greatest, because the most applicable, 
strength was in the hands of the latter. The moneyed in- 
terest is in its nature more ready for any adventure, and its 
possessors more disposed to new enterprises of any kind. 
Being of a recent acquisition, it falls in more naturally with 
any novelties. It is therefore the kind of wealth which will 
be resorted to by all who wish for change. 

Along with the moneyed interest, a new description of 
men had grown up, with whom that interest soon formed a 
close and marked union; I mean the political men of letters. 
Men of letters, fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely 
averse toinnovation. Since the decline of the life and great- 
ness of Louis the Fourteenth, they were not so much culti- 
vated either by him, or by the Regent, or the successors to 
the crown; nor were they engaged to the court by favours 
and emoluments so systematically as during the splendid 
period of that ostentatious and not impolitic reign. What 
they lost in the old court protection they endeavoured 
to make up by joining in a sort of incorporation of their 
own; to which the two academies of France, and after- 
wards the vast undertaking of the Encyclopedia, carried 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 467 


on by a society of these gentlemen, did not a little con- 
tribute. 

The literary cabal had some years ago formed something 
like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian relig- 
ion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which 
hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators of some 
system of piety. They were possessed with a spirit of pros- 
elytism in the most fanatical degree,—and from thence, by 
an easy progress, with the spirit of persecution according to 
their means.24_ What was not to be done towards their great 
end by any direct or immediate act might be wrought by a 
longer process through the medium of opinion. To com- 
mand that opinion, the first step is to establish a dominion 
over those who direct it. They contrived to possess them- 
selves, with great method and perseverance, of all the avenues 
to literary fame. Many of them, indeed, stood high in the 
ranks of literature and science. The world had done them 
justice, and in favour of general talents forgave the evil ten- 
dency of their peculiar principles. This was true liberality ; 
which they returned by endeavouring to confine the reputa- 
tion of sense, learning, and taste to themselves or their 
followers. I will venture to say that this narrow, exclusive 
spirit has not been less prejudicial to literature and to taste 
than to morals and true philosophy. These atheistical 
fathers have a bigotry of their own; and they have learnt to 
talk against monks with the spirit of amonk. But in some 
things they are men of the world. Theresources of intrigue 
are called in to supply the defects of argument and wit. 
To this system of literary monopoly was joined an unremit- 
ting industry to blacken and discredit in every way, and by 
every means, all those who did not hold to their faction. 
To those who have observed the spirit of their conduct it has 
long been clear that nothing was wanted but the power of 
carrying the intolerance of the tongue and of the pen into 
a persecution which would strike at property, liberty, and 
life. 

The desultory and faint persecution carried on against 


468 BURKE 


them, more from compliance with form and decency than 
with serious resentment, neither weakened their strength nor 
relaxed their efforts. Theissue of the whole was, that, what 
with opposition, and what with success, a violent and malig- 
nant zeal, of a kind hitherto unknown in the world, had 
taken an entire possession of their minds, and rendered their 
whole conversation, which otherwise would have been pleas- 
ing and instructive, perfectly disgusting. A spirit of cabal, 
intrigue, and proselytism pervaded all their thoughts, words, 
and actions. And as controversial zeal soon turns its 
thoughts on force, they began to insinuate themselves into a 
correspondence with foreign princes,—in hopes, through 
their authority, which at first they flattered, they might bring 
about the changes they had in view. To them it was indif- 
ferent whether these changes were to be accomplished by 
the thunderbolt of despotism or by the earthquake of popular 
commotion. Thecorrespondence between this cabal and the 
late king of Prussia will throw no small light upon the spirit 
of all their proceedings. For the same purpose for which 
they intrigued with princes, they cultivated, in a distin- 
guished manner, the moneyed interest of France; and 
partly through the means furnished by those whose pecul- 
iar offices gave them the most extensive and certain means 
of communication, they carefully occupied all the avenues to 
opinion. 

Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one 
direction, have great influence on the public mind; the 
alliance, therefore, of these writers with the moneyed in- 
terest 23 had no small effect in removing the popular odium 
and envy which attended that species of wealth. These 
writers, like the propagators of all novelties, pretended to a 
great zeal for the poor and the lower orders, whilst in their 
satires they rendered hateful, by every exaggeration, the 
faults of courts, of nobility, and of priesthood. They be- 
came a sort of demagogues. They served as a link to unite, 
in favour of one object, obnoxious wealth to restless and des- 
perate poverty. 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 469 


As these two kinds of men appear principal leaders in all 
the late transactions, their junction and politics will serve 
to account, not upon any principles of law or of policy, but as 
a cause, for the general fury with which all the landed 
property of ecclesiastical corporations has been attacked, and 
the great care which, contrary to their pretended principles, 
has been taken of a moneyed interest originating from the 
authority of the crown. All the envy against wealth and 
power was artificially directed against other descriptions of 
riches. On what other principle than that which I have 
stated can we account for an appearance so extraordinary 
and unnatural as that of the ecclesiastical possessions, which 
had stood so many successions of ages and shocks of civil 
violences, and were guarded at once by justice and by prej- 
udice, being applied to the payment of debts comparatively 
recent, invidious, and contracted by a decried and subverted 
government. 

Was the public estate a sufficient stake for the public 
debts? Assume that it was not, and that a loss must be 
incurred somewhere. When the only estate lawfully pos- 
sessed, and which the contracting parties had in contempla- 
tion at the time in which their bargain was made, happens 
to fail, who, according to the principles of natural and legal 
equity, ought to be the sufferer? Certainly it ought to be 
either the party who trusted, or the party who persuaded 
him to trust, or both; and not third parties who had no 
concern with the transaction. Upon any insolvency, they 
ought to suffer who were weak enough to lend upon bad 
security, or they who fraudulently held out a security that 
was not valid. Laws are acquainted with no other rules of 
decision. But by the newinstitute of the rights of men, the 
only persons who in equity ought to suffer are the only per- 
sons who are to be saved harmless: those are to answer the 
debt who neither were lenders nor borrowers, mortgagers nor 
mortgagees. 

What had the clergy to do with these transactions? 
What had they to do with any public engagement further 


470 BURKE 


than the extent of their own debt? To that, to be sure, 
their estates were bound to the last acre. Nothing can lead 
more to the true spirit of the Assembly, which sits for public 
confiscation with its new equity and its new morality, than an 
attention to their proceeding with regard to this debt of the 
clergy. The body of confiscators, true to that moneyed in- 
terest for which they were false to every other, have found 
the clergy competent to incur a legal debt. Of course they 
declared them legally entitled to the property which their 
power of incurring the debt and mortgaging the estate im- 
plied: recognizing the rights of those persecuted citizens in 
the very act in which they were thus grossly violated. 

If, as I said, any persons are to make good deficiencies to 
the public creditor, besides the public at large, they must be 
those who managed the agreement. Why, therefore, are not 
the estates of all the comptrollers-general confiscated ?*4 
Why not those of the long succession of ministers, finan- 
ciers, and bankers who have been enriched whilst the nation 
was impoverished by their dealings and their counsels? 
Why is not the estate of M. Laborde declared forfeited 
rather than of the Archbishop of Paris, who has had nothing 
to do in the creation or in the jobbing of the public funds? 
Or, if you must confiscate old landed estates in favour of the 
money jobbers, why is the penalty confined to one descrip- 
tion? J do not know whether the expenses of the Duke de 
Choiseul have left anything of the infinite sums which he 
had derived from the bounty of his master, during the tran- 
sactions of a reign which contributed largely, by every species 
of prodigality in war and peace, to the present debt of 
France. If any such remains, why is not this confiscated ? 
I remember to have been in Paris during the time of the old 
government. I was there just after the Duke d’Aiguillon 
had been snatched (as it was generally thought) from the 
block by the hand of a protecting despotism. He was a 
minister, and had some concern in the affairs of that prodi- 
gal period. Why do I not see his estate delivered up to the 
municipalities in which it is situated? The noble family of 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 471 


Noailles have long been servants (meritorious servants I ad- 
mit) to the crown of France, and have had of course some 
share in its bounties. Why do I hear nothing of the appli- 
cation of their estate to the public debt ? Why is the estate 
of the Duke de Rochefoucault more sacred than that of the 
Cardinal de Rochefoucault? The former is, I doubt not, a 
worthy person; and (if it were not a sort of profaneness to 
talk of the use, as affecting the title to property) he makes a 
good use of his revenues; but it is no disrespect to him to 
say, what authentic information well warrants me in saying, 
that the use made of a property equally valid, by his 
brother,® the Cardinal Archbishop of Rouen, was far more 
laudable and far more public-spirited. Can one hear of the 
proscription of such persons, and the confiscation of their 
effects, without indignation and horror? He is not a man 
who does not feel such emotions on such occasions. He 
does not deserve the name of a free man who will not ex- 
press them. 

Few barbarous conquerors have ever made so terrible a 
revolution in property. None of the heads of the Roman 
factions, when they established crudelem illam hastam in all 
their auctions of rapine, have ever set up to sale the goods 
of the conquered citizen to such an enormous amount. It 
must be allowed in favour of those tyrants of antiquity, that 
what was done by them could hardly be said to be done in 
cold blood. Their passions were inflamed, their tempers 
soured, their understandings confused, with the spirit of 
revenge, with the innumerable reciprocated and recent inflic- 
tions and retaliations of blood andrapine. They were driven 
beyond all bounds of moderation by the apprehension of the 
return of power with the return of property to the families 
of those they had injured beyond all hope of forgiveness. 

These Roman confiscators, who were yet only in the ele- 
ments of tyranny, and were not instructed in the rights of 
men to exercise all sorts of cruelties on each other without 
provocation, thought it necessary to spread a sort of colour 
over their injustice. They considered the vanquished party 


A72 BURKE 


as composed of traitors, who had borne arms, or otherwise 
had acted with hostility, against the commonwealth. They 
regarded them as persons who had forfeited their property 
by their crimes. With you, in your improved state of the 
human mind, there was no such formality. You seized upon 
five millions sterling of annual rent, and turned forty or fifty 
thousand human creatures out of their houses, because 
“such was your pleasure.” The tyrant Harry the Eighth 
of England, as he was not better enlightened than the 
Roman Mariuses and Syllas, and had not studied in your 
new schools, did not know what an effectual instrument of 
despotism was to be found in that grand magazine of offen- 
sive weapons, the rights of men. When he resolved to rob 
the abbeys, as the club of the Jacobins have robbed all the 
ecclesiastics, he began by setting on foot a commission to 
examine into the crimes and abuses which prevailed in those 
communities. As it might be expected, his commission re- 
ported truths, exaggerations, and falsehoods. But truly or 
falsely, it reported abuses and offenses. However, as abuses 
might be corrected, as every crime of persons does not infer 
a forfeiture with regard to communities, and as property, in 
that dark age, was not discovered to bea creature of pre- 
judice, all those abuses (and there were enough of them) 
were hardly thought sufficient ground for such a confiscation 
as it was for his purposes to make. He therefore procured 
the formal surrender of these estates. All these operose 
proceedings were adopted by one of the most decided 
tyrants in the rolls of history, as necessary preliminaries, be- 
fore he could venture, by bribing the members of his two 
servile Houses with a share of the spoil, and holding out to 
them an eternal immunity from taxation, to demand a con- 
firmation of his iniquitous proceedings by an act of Parlia- 
ment. Had fate reserved him to our times, four technical 
terms would have done his business, and saved him all this 
trouble; he needed nothing more than one short form of in- 
cantation :—‘ Philosophy, Light, Liberality, the Rights of 
Men.” 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 473 


I can say nothing in praise of those acts of tyranny, which 
no voice has hitherto ever commended under any of their false 
colours; yet in these false colours an homage was paid by 
despotism to justice. The power which was above all fear 
and all remorse was not set above allshame. Whilst shame 
keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the 
heart, nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds 
of tyrants. 

I believe every honest man sympathizes in his reflections 
with our political poet on that occasion, and will pray to 
avert the omen, whenever these acts of rapacious despotism 
present themselves to his view or his imagination :— 

“ May no such storm 
Fall on our times, where ruin must reform! 
Tell me, my Muse, what monstrous, dire offence. 
What crime could any Christian king incense 
To such a rage? Was’t luxury, or lust? 
Was he so temperate, so chaste, so just ? 
Were these their crimes? They were his own much more: 
But wealth is crime enough to him that’s poor.,’”%6 

This same wealth, which is at all times treason and léze- 
nation to indigent and rapacious despotism, under all modes 
of polity, was your temptation to violate property, law, and 
religion, united in one object. But was the state of France 
so wretched and undone, that no other resource but rapine 
remained to preserve itsexistence? On this point I wish to 
receive some information. When the States met, was the 
condition of the finances of France such, that, after economiz- 
ing, on principles of justice and mercy, through all depart- 
ments, no fair repartition of burdens upon all the orders could 
possibly restore them? If such an equal imposition would 
have been sufficient, you well know it might easily have 
been made. M. Necker, in the budget which he laid before 
the orders assembled at Versailles, made a detailed exposi- 
tion of the state of the French nation.” 

If we give credit to him, it was not necessary to have re- 
course to any new impositions whatsoever, to put the receipts 
of France on a balance with its expenses. He stated the 


A74 BURKE 


permanent charges of all descriptions, including the interest 
of a new loan of four hundred millions, at 531,444,000 livres ; 
the fixed revenue at 475,294,000: making the deficiency 
56,150,000, or short of 2,200,000/. sterling. But to balance 
it, he brought forward savings and improvements of revenue 
(considered as entirely certain) to rather more than the 
amount of that deficiency ; and he concludes with these em- 
phatical words (p. 39) :—‘‘ Quel pays, Messieurs, que celui, 
ou, sans impdts et avec de simples objets inapergus, on peut 
faire disparoitre un déficit quia fait tant de bruit en Europe!” 
As to the reimbursement, the sinking of debt, and the other 
great objects of public credit and political arrangement in- 
dicated in Monsieur Necker’s speech, no doubt could be 
entertained but that a very moderate and proportioned as- 
sessment on the citizens without distinction would have pro- 
vided for all of them to the fullest extent of their demand. 

If this representation of M. Necker was false, then the As- 
sembly are in the highest degree culpable for having 
forced the king to accept as his minister, and, since the 
king’s deposition, for having employed as their minister, 
a man who had been capable of abusing so notoriously the 
confidence of his master and their own: in a matter, too, of 
the highest moment, and directly appertaining to his par- 
ticular office. But ifthe representation was exact, (as, having 
always, along with you, conceived a high degree of respect for 
M. Necker, I make no doubt it was,) then what can be said 
in favour of those who, instead of moderate, reasonable, and 
general contribution, have in cold blood, and impelled 
by no necessity, had recourse to a partial and cruel con- 
fiscation ? 

Was that contribution refused on a pretext of privilege, 
either on the part of the clergy, or on that of the nobility ? 
No, certainly. As to the clergy, they even ran before the 
wishes of the third order. Previous to the meeting of the 
States, they had in all their instructions expressly directed 
their deputies to renounce every immunity which put them 
upon a footing distinct from the condition of their fellow- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 475 


subjects. In this renunciation the clergy were even more ex- 
plicit than the nobility. 

But let us suppose that the deficiency had remained at the 
fifty-six millions, (or 2,200,000/. sterling,) as at first stated by 
M. Necker. Let us allow that all the resources he opposed 
to that deficiency were impudent and groundless fictions, and 
that the Assembly (or their lords of articles*® at the Jaco- 
bins) were from thence justified in laying the whole burden 
of that deficiency on the clergy,—yet allowing all this, a 
necessity of 2,200,000/. sterling will not support a confisca- 
tion to the amount of five millions. The imposition of 
2,200,000/. on the clergy, as partial, would have been oppres- 
sive and unjust, but it would not have been altogether ruin- 
ous to those on whom it was imposed ; and therefore it would 
not have answered the real purpose of the managers. 

Perhaps persons unacquainted with the state of France, on 
hearing the clergy and the noblesse were privileged in point 
of taxation, may be led to imagine, that, previous to the 
Revolution, these bodies had contributed nothing to the 
state. This is a great mistake. They certainly did not con- 
tribute equally with each other, nor either of them equally 
with the commons, They both, however, contributed largely. 
Neither nobility nor clergy enjoyed any exemption from the 
excise on consumable commodities, from duties of custom, or 
from any of the other numerous indirect impositions, which 
in France, as well as here, make so very large a proportion 
of all payments to the public. The noblesse paid the capita- 
tion. They paid also a land-tax, called the twentieth penny, 
to the height sometimes of three, sometimes of four shillings 
in the pound: both of them direct impositions, of no light 
nature, and no trivial produce. The clergy of the provinces 
annexed by conquest to France (which in extent make about 
an eighth part of the whole, but in wealth a much larger pro- 
portion) paid likewise to the capitation and the twentieth 
penny, at the rate paid by the nobility. The clergy in the 
old provinces did not pay the capitation; but they had 
redeemed themselves at the expense of about twenty-four 


476 BURKE 


millions, or a little more than a million sterling. They were 
exempted from the twentieths: but then they made free 
gifts; they contracted debts for the state; and they were 
subject to some other charges, the whole computed at about 
a thirteenth part of their clear income. They ought to have 
paid annually about forty thousand pounds more, to put 
them on a par with the contribution of the nobility. 

When the terrors of this tremendous proscription hung 
over the clergy, they made an offer of a contribution, through 
the Archbishop of Aix, which, for its extravagance, ought 
not to have been accepted. But it was evidently and ob- 
viously more advantageous to the public creditor than any- 
thing which could rationally be promised by the confiscation. 
Why was it not accepted? The reason is plain :—There 
was no desire that the Church should be brought to serve 
the State. The service of the State was made a pretext to 
destroy the Church. In their way to the destruction of the 
Church they would not scruple to destroy their country: 
and they have destroyed it. One great end in the project 
would have been defeated, if the plan of extortion had been 
adopted in lieu of the scheme of confiscation. The new landed 
interest connected with the new republic, and connected with 
it for its very being, could not have been created. This was 
among the reasons why that extravagant ransom was not 
accepted. 

The madness of the project of confiscation, on the plan 
that was first pretended, soon became apparent. To bring 
this unwieldy mass of landed property, enlarged by the con- 
fiscation of all the vast landed domain of the crown, at once 
into market was obviously to defeat the profits proposed by 
the confiscation, by depreciating the value of those lands, 
and indeed of all the landed estates throughout France. 
Such a sudden diversion of all its circulating money from 
trade to land must be an additional mischief. What step 
was taken? Did the Assembly, on becoming sensible of the 
inevitable ill effects of their projected sale, revert to the offers 
of the clergy? No distress could oblige them to travel in a 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 477 


course which was disgraced by any appearance of justice. 
Giving over all hopes from a general immediate sale, another 
project seems to have succeeded. They proposed to take 
stock in exchange for the Church lands. In that project 
great difficulties arose in equalizing the objects to be ex- 
changed. Other obstacles also presented themselves, which 
threw them back again upon some project of sale. The 
municipalities had taken an alarm. They would not hear of 
transferring the whole plunder of the kingdom to the stock- 
holders in Paris. Many of those municipalities had been 
(upon system) reduced to the most deplorable indigence. 
Money was nowhere to be seen. They were therefore led 
to the point that was so ardently desired. They panted for 
a currency of any kind which might revive their perishing 
industry. The municipalities were, then, to be admitted to 
a share in the spoil, which evidently rendered the first scheme 
(if ever it had been seriously entertained) altogether impracti- 
cable. Public exigencies pressed upon all sides. The Minis- 
ter of Finance reiterated his call for supply with a most urgent, 
anxious, and boding voice. Thus pressed on all sides, instead 
of the first plan of converting their bankers into bishops and 
abbots, instead of paying the old debt, they contracted a 
new debt, at three per cent, creating a new paper currency, 
founded on an eventual sale of the Church lands. They 
issued this paper currency to satisfy in the first instance 
chiefly the demands made upon them by the bank of dis- 
count, the great machine or paper-mill of their fictitious 
wealth. 

The spoil of the Church was now become the only resource 
of all their operations in finance, the vital principle of all their 
politics, the sole security for the existence of their power. 
It was necessary, by all, even the most violent means, to put 
every individual on the same bottom, and to bind the nation 
in one guilty interest to uphold this act, and the authority 
of those by whom it was done. In order to force the most 
reluctant into a participation of their pillage, they rendered 
their paper circulation compulsory in all payments. Those 


A78 BURKE 


who consider the general tendency of their schemes to this 
one object as acentre, and a centre from which afterwards 
all their measures radiate, will not think that I dwell too 
long upon this part of the proceedings of the National 
Assembly. 

To cut off all appearance of connection between the crown 
and public justice, and to bring the whole under implicit 
obedience to the dictators in Paris, the old independent judi- 
cature of the Parliaments, with all its merits and all its 
faults, was wholly abolished. Whilst the Parliaments ex- 
isted, it was evident that the people might some time or 
other come to resort to them, and rally under the standard 
of their ancient laws. It became, however, a matter of con- 
sideration, that the magistrates and officers in the courts now 
abolished had purchased their places at avery high rate, for 
which, as wellas forthe duty they performed, they received 
but a very low return of interest. Simple confiscation is a 
boon only for the clergy : to the lawyers some appearances 
of equity are to be observed ; and they are to receive com- 
pensation to an immense amount. Their compensation be- 
comes part of the national debt, for the liquidation of which 
there isthe one exhaustlessfund. The lawyers are to obtain 
their compensation in the new Church paper, which is to 
march with the new principles of judicature and legislature. 
The dismissed magistrates are to take their share of martyr- 
dom with the ecclesiastics, or to receive their own property 
from such a fund and insuch a manner as all those who have 
been seasoned with the ancient principles of jurisprudence, 
and had been the sworn guardians of property, must look 
upon withhorror. Even the clergy are to receive their miser- 
able allowance out of the depreciated paper, which is stamped 
with the indelible character of sacrilege, and with the sym- 
bols of their own ruin, or they must starve. So violent an 
outrage upon credit, property, and liberty, as this compulsory 
paper currency, has seldom been exhibited by the alliance 
of bankruptcy and tyranny, at any time, or in any nation. 

In the course of all these operations, at length comes out 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 479 


the grand arcanum,—that in reality, and in a fair sense, the 
lands of the Church (so far as anything certain can be gath- 
ered from their proceedings) are not to be sold at all. By 
the late resolutions of the National Assembly, they are, in- 
deed, to be delivered to the highest bidder. But it is to be 
observed, that a certain portion only of the purchase money 
is to be laid down. A period of twelve years is to be given 
forthe payment ofthe rest. The philosophic purchasers are 
therefore, on payment of a sort of fine, to be put instantly 
into possession of the estate. It becomesin some respectsa 
sort of gift to them,—to be held on the feudal tenure of zeal 
to the new establishment. This project is evidently to let 
in a body of purchasers without money. The consequence 
will be, that these purchasers, or rather grantees, will pay, 
not only from the rents as they accrue, which might as well 
‘be received by the state, but from the spoil of the materials 
of buildings, from waste in woods, and from whatever money, 
by hands habituated to the gripings of usury, they can wring 
from the miserable peasant. He is to be delivered over to 
the mercenary and arbitrary discretion of men who will be 
stimulated to every species of extortion by the growing 
demands on the growing profits of an estate held under the 
precarious settlement of a new political system. 

When all the frauds, impostures, violences, rapines, burn- 
ings, murders, confiscations, compulsory paper currencies, 
and every description of tyranny and cruelty employed to 
bring about and to uphold this Revolution have their natural 
effect, that is, to shock the moral sentiments of all virtuous 
and sober minds, the abettors of this philosophic system im- 
mediately strain their throats in a declamation against the 
old monarchical government of France. When they have 
rendered that deposed power sufficiently black, they then 
proceed in argument, as if all those who disapprove of their 
new abuses must of course be partisans of the old,—that 
those who reprobate their crude and violent schemes of 
liberty ought to be treated as advocates for servitude. I 
admit that their necessities do compel them to this base and 


480 BURKE 


contemptible fraud. Nothing can reconcile men to their 
proceedings and projects but the supposition that there is 
no third option between them and some tyranny as odious 
as can be furnished by the records of history or by the in- 
vention of poets. This prattling of theirs hardly deserves 
the name of sophistry. It is nothing but plain impudence. 
Have these gentlemen never heard, in the whole circle of the 
worlds of theory and practice, of anything between the des- 
potism of the monarch and the despotism of the multitude ? 
Have they never heard of a monarchy directed by laws, 
controlled and balanced by the great hereditary wealth and 
hereditary dignity of a nation, and both again controlled by 
a judicious check from the reason and feeling of the people 
at large, acting bya suitable and permanent organ? Is it, 
then, impossible that a man may be found who, without 
criminal ill intention or pitiable absurdity, shall prefer such 
a mixed and tempered government to either of the extremes, 
—-and who may repute that nation to be destitute of all wis- 
dom and of all virtue, which, having in its choice to obtain 
such a government with ease, or rather to confirm it when 
actually possessed, thought proper to commit a thousand 
crimes, and to subject their country to a thousand evils, in 
order to avoid it? Is it, then, atruth so universally acknowl- 
edged, that a pure democracy is the only tolerable form into 
which human society can be thrown, that a man is not per- 
mitted to hesitate about its merits, without the suspicion of 
being a friend to tyranny, that is, of being a foe to man- 
kind ? 

I do not know under what description to class the present 
ruling authority in France. It affects to be a pure democ- 
racy, though I think it in a direct train of becoming shortly 
a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy. But for the present 
I admit it to be a contrivance of the nature and effect of 
what it pretends to. I reprobate no form of government 
merely upon abstract principles. There may be situations 
in which the purely democratic form will become necessary. 
There may be some(very few, and very particularly circum- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 481 


stanced) where it would be clearly desirable. This I do not 
take to be the case of France, or of any other great country. 
Until now, we have seen no examples of considerable de- 
mocracies. The ancients were better acquainted with them. 
Not being wholly unread in the authors who had seen the 
most of those constitutions, and who best understood them, 
I can not help concurring with their opinion, that an absolute 
democracy no more than absolute monarchy is to be reck- 
oned among the legitimate forms of government. They 
think it rather the corruption and degeneracy than the sound 
constitution of arepublic. IfI recollect rightly, Aristotle 
observes, that a democracy has many striking points of re- 
semblance with a tyranny.” Of this I am certain, that in a 
democracy the majority of the citizens is capable of exercis- 
ing the most cruel oppressions upon the minority, whenever 
strong divisions prevail in that kind of polity, as they often 
must,—and that oppression of the minority will extend to 
far greater numbers, and will be carried on with much greater 
fury, than can almost ever be apprehended from the do- 
minion of a single sceptre. In such a popular persecution, 
individual sufferers are in a much more deplorable condi- 
tion than in any other. Under acruel prince they have 
the balmy compassion of mankind to assuage the smart 
of their wounds, they have the plaudits of the people to an- 
imate their generous constancy under their sufferings : but 
those who are subjected to wrong under multitudes are de- 
prived of all external consolation ; they seem deserted by 
mankind, overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole species. 

But admitting democracy not to have that inevitable 
tendency to party tyranny which I suppose it to have, and 
admitting it to possess as much good in it when unmixed as 
I am sure it possesses when compounded with other forms; 
does monarchy, on its part, contain nothing at all to recom- 
mend it? Ido not often quote Bolingbroke, nor have his 
works in general left any permanent impression on my mind. 
He is a presumptuous and a superficial writer. But he has 
one observation which in my opinion is not without depth 

31 


482 | BURKE 


and solidity. He says that he prefers a monarchy to other 
governments, because you can better ingraft any description 
of republic on a monarchy than anything of monarchy upon 
the republican forms. I think him perfectly in the right. 
The fact is so historically, and it agrees well with the 
speculation. 

I know how easy a topic it is to dwell on the faults of 
departed greatness. By a revolution in the state, the fawn- 
ing sycophant of yesterday is converted into the austere 
critic of the present hour. But steady, independent minds, 
when they have an object of so serious a concern to man- 
kind as government under their contemplation, will disdain 
to assume the part of satirists and declaimers. They will 
judge of human institutions as they do of human characters. 
They will sort out the good from the evil, whee is mixed in 
mortal institutions as it is in mortal men. 

Your government in France, though usually, and I think 
justly, reputed the best of the unqualified or ill-qualified 
monarchies, was still full of abuses. These abuses accumu- 
lated in a length of time, as they must accumulate in every 
monarchy not under the constant inspection of a popular 
representative. I am no stranger to the faults and defects 
of the subverted government of France; and I think I am 
not inclined by nature or policy to make a panegyric upon 
anything which is a just and natural object of censure. 
But the question is not now of the vices of that monarchy, 
but of its existence. Is it, then, true, that the French 
government was such as to be incapable or undeserving of 
reform, so that it was of absolute necessity the whole fabric 
should be at once pulled down, and the area cleared for the 
erection of a theoretic, experimental edifice in its place? 
All France was of a different opinion in the beginning of 
the year 1789. The instructions to the representatives to 
the States-General, from every district in that kingdom, were 
filled with projects for the reformation of that government, 
without the remotest suggestion of a design to destroy it. 
Had such a design been then even insinuated, I believe there 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 483 


would have been but one voice, and that voice for rejecting 
it with scorn and horror. Men have been sometimes led by 
degrees, sometimes hurried, into things of which, if they 
could have seen the whole together, they never would have 
permitted the most remote approach. When those instruc- 
tions were given, there was no question but that abuses 
existed, and that they demanded a reform: nor is there now. 
In the interval between the instructions and the Revolution 
things changed their shape; and in consequence of that 
change, the true question at present is, whether those who 
would have reformed or those who have destroyed are in the 
right. 

To hear some men speak of the late monarchy of France, 
you would imagine that they were talking of Persia bleeding 
under the ferocious sword of Thamas Kouli Khan,—or at 
least describing the barbarous anarchic despotism of Turkey, 
where the finest countries in the most genial climates in the 
world are wasted by peace more than any countries have 
been worried by war, where arts are unknown, where manu- 
factures languish, where science is extinguished, where agri- 
culture decays, where the human race itself melts away and 
perishes under the eye of the observer. Was this the case 
of France? I have no way of determining the question but 
by a reference to facts. Facts do not support this resem- 
blance. Along with much evil, there is some good in mon- 
archy itself; and some corrective to its evil from religion, 
from laws, from manners, from opinions, the French mon- 
archy must have received, which rendered it (though by no 
means a free, and therefore by no means a good constitution) 
a despotism rather in appearance than in reality. 

Among the standards upon which the effects of govern- 
ment on any country are to be estimated, I must consider 
the state of its population as not the least certain. No 
country in which population flourishes, and is in progressive 
improvement, can be under a very mischievous government. 
About sixty years ago, the Intendants of the Generalities of 
France made, with other matters, a report of the population 


484 BURKE 


of their several districts. I have not the books, which are 
very voluminous, by me, nor do I know where to procure 
them, (I am obliged to speak by memory, and therefore the 
less positively,) but I think the population of France was by 
them, even at that period, estimated at twenty-two millions 
of souls. At the end of the last century it had been gener- 
ally calculated at eighteen. On either of these estimations, 
France was not ill-peopled. M. Necker, who is an authority 
for his own time at least equal to the Intendants for theirs, 
reckons, and upon apparently sure principles, the people of 
France, in the year 1780, at twenty-four millions six hundred 
and seventy thousand. But was this the probable ultimate 
term under the old establishment? Dr. Price is of opinion 
that the growth of population in France was by no means 
at its acme in that year. I certainly defer to Dr. Price’s 
authority a good deal more in these speculations than I do 
in his general politics. This gentleman, taking ground on 
M. Necker’s data, is very confident that since the period of 
that minister’s calculation the French population has in- 
creased rapidly,—so rapidly, that in the year 1789 he will 
not consent to rate the people of that kingdom at a lower 
number than thirty millions. Afterabating much (and much 
I think ought to be abated) from the sanguine calculation 
of Dr. Price, I have no doubt that the population of France 
did increase considerably during this latter period: but 
supposing that it increased to nothing more than will be 
sufficient to complete the twenty-four millions six hundred 
and seventy thousand to twenty-five millions, still a popula- 
tion of twenty-five millions, and that in an increasing prog- 
ress, on a space of about twenty-seven thousand square 
leagues, is immense. It is, for instance, a good deal more 
than the proportionable population of this island, or even 
than that of England, the best peopled part of the United 
Kingdom. 

It is not universally true that France is a fertile country. 
Considerable tracts of it are barren, and labour under other 
natural disadvantages. In the portions of that territory 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 485 


where things are more favourable, as far as I am able to dis- 
cover, the numbers of the people correspond to the indul- 
gence of Nature? The Generality of Lisle, (this I admit is 
the strongest example,) upon an extent of four hundred and 
four leagues and a half, about ten years ago contained seven 
hundred and thirty-four thousand six hundred souls, which 
is one thousand seven hundred and seventy-two inhabitants 
to each square league. The middle term for the rest of 
France is about nine hundred inhabitants to the same 
admeasurement. 

I do not attribute this population to the deposed govern- 
ment; because I do not like tocompliment the contrivances 
of men with what is due ina great degree to the bounty of. 
Providence. But that decried government could not have 
obstructed, most probably it favoured, the operation of those 
causes, (whatever they were,) whether of Nature in the soil, 
or habits of industry among the people, which has produced 
so large a number of the species throughout that whole 
kingdom, and exhibited in some particular places such prod- 
_ igies of population. I never will suppose that fabric ofa 
state to be the worst of all political institutions which by 
experience is found to contain a principle favourable (how 
ever latent it may be) to the increase of mankind. 

The wealth of a country is another, and no contemptible 
standard, by which we may judge whether, on the whole, a 
government be protecting or destructive. France far exceeds 
England in the multitude of her people; but I apprehend 
that her comparative wealth is much inferior to ours,—that 
it is not so equal in the distribution, nor so ready in the 
circulation. I believe the difference in the form of the two 
governments to be amongst the causes of this advantage-on 
_ the side of England: I speak of England, not of the whole 
British dominions,—which, if compared with those of France, 
will in some degree weaken the comparative rate of wealth 
upon our side. But that wealth, which will not endure a 
comparison with the riches of England, may constitute a 
very respectable degree of opulence. M. Necker’s book, 


486 BURKE 


published in 1785,3! contains an accurate and interesting 
collection of facts relative to public economy and to political 
arithmetic ; and his speculations on the subject are in general 
wise and liberal. In that work he gives an idea of the state 
of France, very remote from the portrait of acountry whose 
government was a perfect grievance, an absolute evil, admit- 
ting no cure but through the violent and uncertain remedy 
of a total-revolution. He affirms, that from the year 1726 
to the year 1784 there was coined at the mint of France, in 
the species of gold and silver, to the amount of about one 
hundred millions of pounds sterling. 

It is imposible that M. Necker should be mistaken in the 
amount of the bullion which has been coined in the mint. 
It is a matter of officialrecord. The reasonings of this able 
financier concerning the quantity of gold and silver which 
remained for circulation, when he wrote in 1785, that is, about 
four years before the deposition and imprisonment of the 
French king, are not of equal certainty; but they are laid 
on grounds so apparently solid, that it is not easy to refuse 
a considerable degree of assent to his calculation. He cal- 
culates the numéraire, or what we call specie, then actually 
existing in France, at about eighty-eight millions of the 
same English money. A great accumulation of wealth for 
one country, largeas that country is! M. Necker was so far 
from considering this influx of wealth as likely to cease, 
when he wrote in 1785, that he presumes upon a future an- 
nual increase of two per cent upon the money brought into 
France during the periods from which he computed. 

Some adequate cause must have originally introduced all 
the money coined at its mint into that kingdom ; and some 
cause as operative must have kept at home, or returned into 
its bosom, such a vast flood of treasure as M. Necker calcu- 
lates to remain for domestic circulation. Suppose any 
reasonable deductions from M. Necker’s computation, the 
remainder must still amount to an immense sum. Causes 
thus powerful to acquire and to retain can not be found in 
discouraged industry, insecure property, and a positively 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 487 


destructive government. Indeed, when I consider the face 
of the kingdom of France, the multitude and opulence of her 
cities, the useful magnificence of her spacious high-roads and 
bridges, the opportunity of her artificial canals and naviga- 
tions opening the conveniences of maritime communication 
through a solid continent of so immense an extent,— 
when I turn my eyes to the stupendous works of her ports and 
harbours and to her whole naval apparatus, whether for war 
or trade,—when I bring before my view the number of her 
fortifications, constructed with so bold and masterly a skill, 
and made and maintained at so prodigiousa charge, present- 
ing an armed front and impenetrable barrier to her enemies 
upon every side,—when I recollect how very small a part of 
that extensive region is without cultivation, and to what com- 
plete perfection the culture of many of the best productions 
of the earth have been brought in France,—when I reflect on 
the excellence of her manufactures and fabrics, second to 
none but ours, and in some particulars not second,—when I 
contemplate the grand foundations of charity, public and 
private,—when I survey the state of all the arts that beautify 
and polish life,—when I reckon the men she has bred for ex- 
tending her fame in war, her able statesmen, the multitude of 
her profound lawyers and theologians, her philosophers, her 
critics, her historians and antiquaries, her poets and her 
orators, sacred and profane,—I behold in all this something 
which awes and commands the imagination, which checks 
the mind on the brink of precipitate and indiscriminate 
censure, and which demands that we should very seriously 
examine what and how great are the latent vices that could 
authorize us at once to level so spacious a fabric with the 
ground. I do not recognize in this view of things the des- 
potism of Turkey. Nor do I discern the character of a 
government that has been on the whole so oppressive, or so 
corrupt, or so negligent, as to be utterly unfit for all refor- 
mation. I must think such a government well deserved to 
have its excellences heightened, its faults corrected, and its 
capacities improved into a British Constitution. 


488 BURKE 


Whoever has examined into the proceedings of that de- 
posed government for several years back can not fail to have 
observed, amidst the inconstancy and fluctuation natural to 
courts, and earnest endeavour towards the prosperity and im- 
provement of the country; he must admit that it had long 
been employed, in some instances wholly to remove, in 
many considerably to correct, the abusive practices and 
usages that had prevailed in the state,—and that even the 
unlimited power of the sovereign over the persons of his 
subjects, inconsistent, as undoubtedly it was, with law and 
liberty, had yet been every day growing more mitigated in 
the exercise. So far from refusing itself to reformation, that 
government was open, with acensurable degree of facility, 
to all sorts of projectsand projectors on the subject. Rather 
too much countenance was given to the spirit of innovation, 
which soon was turned against those who fostered it, and 
ended in their ruin. It is but cold, and no very flattering 
justice to that fallen monarchy, to say, that, for many years, 
it trespassed more by levity and want of judgment in several 
of its schemes than from any defect in diligence or in public 
spirit. To compare the government of France for the last 
fifteen or sixteen years with wise and well-constituted estab- 
lishments during that, or during any period, is not to act 
with fairness. But if in point of prodigality in the expen- 
diture of money, or in point of rigour in the exercise of 
power, it be compared with any of the former reigns, I be- 
lieve candid judges will give little credit to the good in- 
tentions of those who dwell perpetually on the donations to 
favourites, or on the expenses of the court, or on the horrors 
of the Bastile, in the reign of Louis the Sixteenth. 

Whether the system, if it deserves such a name, now built 
on the ruins of that ancient monarchy, will be able to give a 
better account of the population and wealth of the country 
which it has taken under its care, is a matter very doubtful. 
Instead of improving by the change, I apprehend that a long 
series of years must be told, before it can recover in any 
degree the effects of this philosophic Revolution, and before 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 489 


the nation can be replaced on its former footing. If Dr. 
Price should think fit, a few years hence, to favour us with 
an estimate of the population of France, he will hardly be 
able to make up his tale of thirty millions of souls, as com- 
puted in 1789, or the Assembly’s computation of twenty-six 
millions of that year, or even M. Necker’s twenty-five mil- 
lions in 1780. I hear that there are considerable emigrations 
from France,—and that many, quitting that voluptuous 
climate, and that seductive Circean liberty, have taken 
refuge.in the frozen regions and under the British despotism 
of Canada. 

In the present disappearance of coin, no person could 
think it the same country in which the present minister of 
the finances has been able to discover fourscore millions 
sterling in specie. From its general aspect one would con- 
' clude that it had been for some time past under the special 
direction of the learned academicians of Laputa and Balni- 
barbi3* Already the population of Paris has so declined 
that M. Necker stated to the National Assembly the pro- 
vision to be made for its subsistence at a fifth less than what 
had formerly been found requisite. It is said (and I have 
never heard it contradicted) that ahundred thousand people 
are out of employment in that city, though it is become the 
seat of the imprisoned court and National Assembly. Noth- 
ing, I am credibly informed, can exceed the shocking and 
disgusting spectacle of mendicancy displayed in that capital. 
Indeed, the votes of the National Assembly leave no doubt 
of the fact. They have lately appointed a standing commit- 
tee of mendicancy. They are contriving at once a vigorous 
police on this subject, and, for the first time, the imposition 
of a tax to maintain the poor, for whose present relief great 
sums appear on the face of the public accounts of the year. 
In the mean time the leaders of the legislative clubs and 
coffee-houses are intoxicated with admiration at their own 
wisdom and ability. They speak with the most sovereign 
contempt of the rest of the world. They tell the people, to 
comfort them inthe rags with which they have clothed them, 


490 BURKE 


that they are a nation of philosophers ; and sometimes, by 
all the arts of quackish parade, by show, tumult, and bustle, | 
sometimes by the alarms of plots and invasions, they at- 
tempt to drown the cries of indigence, and to divert the eyes 
of the observer from the ruin and wretchedness of the state. 
A brave people will certainly prefer liberty accompanied 
with a virtuous poverty to a depraved and wealthy servitude. 
But before the price of comfort and opulence is paid, one 
ought to be pretty sure it is real liberty which is purchased, 
and that she is to be purchased at no other price. I shall 
always, however, consider that liberty as very equivocal in 
her appearance, which has not wisdom and justice for her 
companions, and does not lead prosperity and plenty in her 
train. 

The advocates for this Revolution, not satisfied with ex- 
aggerating the vices of their ancient government, strike at 
the fame of their country itself, by painting almost all that 
could have attracted the attention of strangers, I mean their 
nobility and their clergy, as objects of horror. If this were 
only a libel, there had not been much in it. But it has prac- 
tical consequences. Had your nobility and gentry, who 
formed the great body of your landed men and the whole of 
your military officers, resembled those of Germany, at the 
period when the Hanse towns were necessitated to confed- 
erate against the nobles in defense of their property,—had 
they been like the Orsini and Vitelli in Italy, who used to 
sally from their fortified dens to rob the trader and traveler, 
—had they been such as the Mamelukes in Egypt, or the 
Nayres on the coast of Malabar,—I do admit that too 
critical an inquiry might not be advisable into the means of 
freeing the world from such a nuisance. The statues of 
Equity and Mercy might be veiled for a moment. The 
tenderest minds, confounded with the dreadful exigence in 
which morality submits to the suspension of its own rules in 
favour of its own principles, might turn aside whilst fraud and 
violence were accomplishing the destruction of a pretended 
nobility, which disgraced, whilst it persecuted, human nature. 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 491 


The persons most abhorrent from blood and treason and 
arbitrary confiscation might remain silent spectators of this 
civil war between the vices. 

But did the privileged nobility who met under the king’s 
precept at Versailles in 1789, or their constituents, deserve 
to be looked on as the Nayres or Mamelukes of this age, or 
as the Orsini and Vitelli of ancient times? If I had been 
asked the question, I should have passed for a madman. 
What have they since done, that they were to be driven into 
exile, that their persons should be hunted about, mangled, 
and tortured, their families dispersed, their houses laid in 
ashes, and that their order should be abolished, and the 
memory of it, if possible, extinguished, by ordaining them 
to change the very names by which they were usually known? 
Read their instructions to their representatives. They 
breathe the spirit of liberty as warmly, and they recommend 
reformation as strongly, asany otherorder. ‘Their privileges 
relative to contribution were voluntarily surrendered ; as the 
king, from the beginning, surrendered all pretense to a right 
of taxation. Upon a free constitution there was but one 
opinion in France. The absolute monarchy was at an end. 
It breathed its last without a groan, without struggle, with- 
out convulsion. All the struggle, all the dissension, arose 
afterwards, upon the preference of a despotic democracy to 
a government of reciprocal control. The triumph of the 
victorious party was over the principles of a British Con- 
stitution. 

I have observed the affectation which for many years past 
has prevailed in Paris, even to a degree perfectly childish, of 
idolizing the memory of your Henry the Fourth. If any- 
thing could put any one out of humour with that ornament 
to the kingly character, it would be this overdone style of 
insidious panegyric. The persons who have worked this 
engine the most busily are those who have ended their pane- 
gyrics in dethroning his successor and descendant: a man as 
good-natured, at the least, as Henry the Fourth; altogether 
as fond of his people; and who has done infinitely more to 


492 BURKE 


correct the ancient vices of the state than that great monarch 
did, or we are sure he ever meant to do. Well it is for his 
panegyrists that they have not him to deal with! For Henry 
of Navarre was a resolute, active, and politic prince. He 
possessed, indeed, great humanity and mildness, but an 
humanity and mildness that never stood in the way of his 
interests. He never sought to be loved without putting 
himself first in a condition to be feared. He used soft lan- 
guage with determined conduct. He asserted and main- 
tained his authority in the gross, and distributed his acts of 
concession only in the detail. He spent the income of his 
prerogative nobly, but he took care not to break in upon the 
capital,—never abandoning for a moment any of the claims 
which he made under the fundamental laws, nor sparing to 
shed the blood of those who opposed him, often in the field, 
sometimes upon the scaffold. Because he knew how to make 
his virtues respected by the ungrateful, he has merited the 
praises of those whom, if they had lived in his time, he would 
have shut up in the Bastile, and brought to punishment along 
with the regicides whom he hanged after he had famished 
Paris into a surrender. 

If these panegyrists are in earnest in their admiration of 
Henry the Fourth, they must remember that they can not 
think more highly of him than he did of the noblesse of 
France,—whose virtue, honour, courage, patriotism, and 
loyalty, were his constant theme. 

But the nobility of France are degenerated since the days 
of Henry the Fourth.—This is possible; but it is more than 
I can believe to be true in any great degree. I do not pre- 
tend to know France as correctly as some others; but I have 
endeavoured through my whole life to make myself ac- 
quainted with human nature,—otherwise I should be unfit 
to take even my humble part in the service of mankind. In 
that study I could not pass by a vast portion of our nature 
as it appeared modified in a country but twenty-four miles 
from the shores of this island. On my best observation, - 
compared with my best inquiries, I found your nobility for 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 4093 


the greater part composed of men of a high spirit, and ofa 
delicate sense of honour, both with regard to themselves in- 
dividually, and with regard to their whole corps, over whom 
they kept, beyond what is common in other countries, a cen- 
sorial eye. They were tolerably well bred; very officious, 
humane, and hospitable; in their conversation frank and 
open; with a good military tone; and reasonably tinctured 
with literature, particularly of the authors in their own lan- 
guage. Many had pretensions far above this description. I 
speak of those who were generally met with. 

As to their behaviour to the inferior classes, they appeared 
to me to comport themselves towards them with good-nature, 
and with something more nearly approaching to familiarity 
than is generally practised with us in the intercourse between 
the higher and lower ranks of life. To strike any person, 
even in the most abject condition, was a thing in a manner 
unknown, and would be highly disgraceful. Instances of 
other ill-treatment of the humble part of the community 
were rare; and as to attacks made upon the property, or the 
personal liberty of the commons, I never heard of any what- 
soever from them,—nor, whilst the laws were in vigour under 
the ancient government, would such tyranny in subjects 
have been permitted. As men of landed estates, I had no 
fault to find with their conduct, though much to reprehend, 
and much to wish changed, in many of the old tenures. 
Where the letting of their land was by rent, I could not dis- 
cover that their agreements with their farmers were oppres- 
sive ; nor when they were in partnership with the farmer, as 
often was the case, have I heard that they had taken the 
lion’s share. The proportions seemed not inequitable. 
There might be exceptions; but certainly they were excep- 
tions only. I have no reason to believe that in these re- 
spects the landed noblesse of France were worse than the 
landed gentry of this country,—certainly in no respect more 
vexatious than the landowners, not noble, of their own 
nation. In cities the nobility had no manner of power; in 
the country very little. You know, Sir, that much of the 


AQ4 BURKE 


civil government, and the police in the most essential parts, 
was not in the hands of that nobility which presents itself 
first to our consideration. The revenue, the system and col- 
lection of which were the most grievous parts of the French 
government, was not administered by the men of the sword; 
nor were they answerable for the vices of its principle, or the 
vexations, where any such existed, in its management. 

Denying, as I am well warranted to do, that the nobility 
had any considerable share in the oppression of the people, 
in cases in which real oppression existed, I am ready to 
admit that they were not without considerable faults and 
errors. A foolish imitation of the worst part of the manners 
of England, which impaired their natural character, without 
substituting in its place what perhaps they meant to copy, 
has certainly rendered them worse than formerly they were. 
Habitual dissoluteness of manners, continued beyond the 
pardonable period of life, was more common amongst them 
than it is with us; and it reigned with the less hope of 
remedy, though possibly with something of less mischief, 
by being covered with more exterior decorum. They 
countenanced too much that licentious philosophy which 
has helped to bring on their ruin. There was another error 
amongst them more fatal. Those of the commons who 
approached to or exceeded many of the nobility in point of 
wealth were not fully admitted to the rank and estimation 
which wealth, in reason and good policy, ought to bestow in 
every country,—though I think not equally with that of 
other nobility. The two kinds of aristocracy were too punc- 
tiliously kept asunder: less so, however, than in Germany 
and some other nations. 

This separation, as I have already taken the liberty of 
suggesting to you, I conceive to be one principal cause of 
the destruction of the old nobility. The military, particu- 
larly, was too exclusively reserved for men of family. But, 
after all, this was an error of opinion, which a conflicting 
opinion would have rectified. A permanent Assembly, in 
which the commons had their share of power, would soon 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION = 495 


abolish whatever was too invidious and insulting in these 
distinctions ; and even the faults in the morals of the nobility 
would have been probably corrected, by the greater varieties 
of occupation and pursuit to which a constitution by orders 
would have given rise. 

All this violent cry against the nobility I take to be a 
mere work of art. To be honoured and even privileged by 
the laws, opinions, and inveterate usages of our country, 
growing out of the prejudices of ages, has nothing to pro- 
voke horror and indignation in any man. Even to be too 
tenacious of those privileges is not absolutely a crime. The 
strong struggle in every individual to preserve possession of 
what he has found to belong to him, and to distinguish him, 
is one of the securities against injustice and despotism im- 
planted in our nature. It operates as an instinct to secure 
property, and to preserve communities in a settled state. 
What is there to shock in this? Nobility is a graceful orna- 
ment to the civil order. It is the Corinthian capital of 
polished society. ‘‘ Omnes boni nobilitati semper favemus,”’ 
was the saying of a wise and good man. It is, indeed, one 
side of a liberal and benevolent mind to incline to it with 
some sort of partial propensity. He feels no ennobling 
principle in his own heart, who wishes to level all the arti- 
ficial institutions which have been adopted for giving a body 
to opinion and permanence to future esteem. It is a sour, 
malignant, envious disposition, without taste for the reality, 
or for any image or representation of virtue, that sees with 
joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in splendour 
andinhonour. I donot like to see anything destroyed, any 
void produced in society, any ruin on the face of the land. 
It was therefore with no disappointment or dissatisfaction 
that my inquiries and observations did not present to me 
any incorrigible vices in the noblesse of France, or any abuse 
which could not be removed by a reform very short of 
abolition. Your noblesse did not deserve punishment; but 
to degrade is to punish. 

It was with the same satisfaction I found that the result 


496 BURKE 


of my inquiry concerning your clergy was not dissimilar. It 
is no soothing news to my ears, that great bodies of men are 
incurably corrupt. It is not with much credulity I listen to 
any, when they speak evil of those whom they are going to 
plunder. I rather suspect that vices are feigned or exagger- 
ated, when profit is looked for in their punishment. An 
enemy is a bad witness; a robber is a worse. Vices and 
abuses were undoubtedly in that order, and must be. It 
was an old establishment, and not frequently revised. But I 
saw no crimes in the individuals that merited confiscation of 
their substance, nor those cruel insults and degradations, 
and that unnatural persecution, which have been substituted 
in the place of meliorating regulation. 

If there had been any just cause for this new religious per- 
secution, the atheistic libellers, who act as trumpeters to ani- 
mate the populace to plunder, do not love anybody so much 
as not to dwell with complacence on the vices of the exist- 
ing clergy. This they have notdone. They find themselves 
obliged to rake into the histories of former ages (which they 
have ransacked with a maligant and profligate industry) for 
every instance of oppression and persecution which has been 
made by that body or in its favour, in order to justify, upon 
very iniquitous because very illogical principles of retaliation, 
their own persecutions and their own cruelties. After de- 
stroying all other genealogies and family distinctions, they | 
invent asort of pedigree of crimes. It is not very just to 
chastise men for the offenses of their natural ancestors ; but 
to take the fiction of ancestry in a corporate succession, as 
a ground for punishing men who have no relation to guilty 
acts, except in names and general descriptions, is a sort of 
refinement in injustice belonging to the philosophy of this 
enlightened age. The Assembly punishes men, many, if not 
most, of whom abhor the violent conduct of ecclesiastics in 
former times as much as their present persecutors can do, 
and who would beas loud and as strong in the expression of 
that sense, if they were not well aware of the purposes for 
which all this declamation is employed. 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 497 


Corporate bodies are immortal for the good of the mem- 
bers, but not for their punishment. Nations themselves are 
such corporations. As well might we in England think of 
waging inexpiable war upon all Frenchmen for the evils 
which they have brought upon us in the several periods of 
our mutual hostilities. You might, on your part, think your- 
selves justified in falling upon all Englishmen on account of 
the unparalleled calamities brought upon the people of France 
by the unjust invasions of our Henrys and our Edwards. 
Indeed, we should be mutually justified in this extermina- 
tory war upon each other, full as much as you are in the 
unprovoked persecution of your present countrymen, on 
account of the conduct of men of the same name in other 
times. 

We do not draw the moral lessons we might from history. 
On the contrary, without care it may be used to vitiate our 
minds and to destroy our happiness. In history a great 
volume is unrolled for ourinstruction, drawing the materials 
of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of man- 
kind. It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine, fur- 
nishing offensive and defensive weapons for parties in Church 
and State, and supplying the means of keeping alive or re- 
viving dissensions and animosities, and adding fuel to civil 
fury. History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries 
brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, 
lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train 
of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same 


“troublous storms that toss 
The private state, and render life unsweet.” 


These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, 
laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are 
the pretexts. The pretexts are always found in some specious 
appearance ofa real good. You would not secure men from 
tyranny and sedition by rooting out of the mind the princi- 
ples to which these fraudulent pretexts apply ? If you did, 
you would root out everything that is valuable in the human 
32 


498 BURKE 


breast. As these are the pretexts, so the ordinary actorsand 
instruments in great public evils are kings, priests, magis- 
trates, senates, parliaments, national assemblies, judges, and 
captains. You would not cure the evil by resolving that there 
should be no more monarchs, nor ministers of state, nor of 
the Gospel,—no interpreters of law, no general officers, no 
public councils. You might change the names: the things. 
in some shape must remain. A certain quantum of power 
must always exist in the community, in some hands, and 
under some appellation. Wise men will apply their remedies 
to vices, not to names,—to the causes of evil, which are per- 
manent, not to the occasional organs by which they act, and 
the transitory modes in which they appear. Otherwise you 
will be wise historically, a foolin practise. Seldom have two 
ages the same fashion in their pretext, and the same modes of 
mischief. Wickedness is a little more inventive. Whilst 
you are discussing fashion, the fashion is gone by. The 
very same vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmi- 
grates ; and, far from losing its principle of life by the change 
of its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs with the 
fresh vigour of a juvenile activity. It walks abroad, it con- 
tinues its ravages, whilst you are gibbeting the carcass or de- 
molishing the tomb. You are terrifying yourselves with 
ghosts and apparitions, whilst your house is the haunt of 
robbers. It is thus with all those who, attending only to 
the shell and husk of history, think they are waging war with 
intolerance, pride, and cruelty, whilst, under colour of abhor- 
ring the ill principles of antiquated parties, they are authoriz- 
ing and feeding the same odious vices in different factions, 
and perhaps in worse. 

Your citizens of Paris formerly had lent themselves as the 
ready instruments to slaughter the followers of Calvin, at 
the infamous massacre of St. Bartholomew. What should 
we say to those who could think of retaliating on the Paris- 
ians of this day the abominations and horrors of that time? 
They are, indeed, brought to abhor that massacre. Fero- 
cious as they are, it isnot difficult to make them dislike it, be- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 499 


cause the politicians and fashionable teachers have no inter- 
est in giving their passions exactly the same direction. Still, 
however, they find it their interest to keep the same savage dis- 
positionalive. It was but the other day that they caused this 
very massacre to be acted on the stage for the diversion of the 
descendants of those whocommittedit. Inthis tragic farce 
they produced.the Cardinal of Lorraine in his robes of function, 
ordering general slaughter. Was this spectacle intended to 
make the Parisians abhor persecution and loathe the effusion 
of blood? No: it was to teach them to persecute their own 
pastors ; it was to excite them, by raising a disgust and hor- 
ror of their clergy, to an alacrity in hunting down to destruc- 
tion an order which, if it ought to exist at all, ought to ex- 
ist not only in safety, but in reverence. It was to stimulate 
their cannibal appetites (which one would think had been 
gorged sufficiently) by variety and seasoning,—and to quick- 
en them to an alertness in new murders and massacres, if it 
should suit the purpose of the Guises of the day. An assembly 
in which sat a multitude of priests and prelates was obliged 
to suffer this indignity at its door. The author was not sent 
to the galleys, nor the players to the house of correction. 
Not long after this exhibition, those players came forward to 
the Assembly to claim the rites of that very religion which 
they had dared to expose, and to show their prostituted 
faces in the senate, whilst the Archbishop of Paris, whose 
function was known to his people only by his prayers and 
benedictions, and his wealth only by alms, is forced to aban- 
don his house, and to fly from his flock, (as from ravenous 
wolves,) because, truly, in the sixteenth century, the Cardi- 
nal of Lorraine was a rebel and a murderer. * 

Such is the effect of the perversion of history by those 
who, for the same nefarious purposes, have perverted every 
other part of learning. But those who will stand upon that 
elevation of reason which places centuries under our eye 
and brings things to the true point of comparison, which 
obscures little names and effaces the colours of little parties, 
and to which nothing can ascend but the spirit and moral 


500 BURKE 


quality of human actions, will say to the teachers of the 
Palais Royal,—The Cardinal of Lorraine was the murderer 
of the sixteenth century; you have the glory of being the 
murderers in the eighteenth ; and this is the only difference 
between you. But history in the nineteenth century, better 
understood and better employed, will, I trust, teach a civil- 
ized posterity to abhor the misdeeds of both these barbarous 
ages. It will teach future priests and magistrates not to 
retaliate upon the speculative and inactive atheists of future 
times the enormities committed by the present practical 
zealots and furious fanatics of that wretched error, which, in 
its quiescent state, is more than punished, whenever it is 
embraced. It will teach posterity not to make war upon 
either religion or philosophy for the abuse which the hypo- 
crites of both have made of the two most valuable blessings 
conferred upon us by the bounty of the universal Patron, 
who in all things eminently favours and protects the race of 
man. 

If your clergy, or any clergy, should show themselves 
vicious beyond the fair bounds allowed to human infirmity 
and to those professional faults which can hardly be sep- 
arated from professional virtues, though their vices never 
can countenance the exercise of oppression, I do admit that 
they would naturally have the effect of abating very much 
of our indignation against the tyrants who exceed measure 
and justice in their punishment. I can allow in clergymen, 
through all their divisions, some tenaciousness of their own 
opinion, some overflowings of zeal for its propagation, some 
predilection to their own state and office, some attachment 
to the interest of their own corps, some preference to those 
who listen with docility to their doctrines beyond those who 
scorn and deride them. I allow all this, because I am a man 
who have to deal with men, and who would not, through a 
violence of toleration, run into the greatest of all intolerance. 
I must bear with infirmities, until they fester into crimes. 

Undoubtedly, the natural progress of the passions, from 
frailty to vice, ought to be prevented by a watchful eye and 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Sol 


afirm hand. But is it true that the body of your clergy 
had passed those limits of a just allowance? From the 
general style of your late publications of all sorts, one would 
be led to believe that your clergy in France were a sort of 
monsters: an horrible composition of superstition, igno- 
rance, sloth, fraud, avarice, and tyranny. But is this true? 
Is it true that the lapse of time, the cessation of conflicting 
interests, the woeful experience of the evils resulting from 
party rage, have had no sort of influence gradually to meli- 
orate their minds! Is it true that they were daily renewing 
invasions on the civil power, troubling the domestic quiet of 
their country, and rendering the operations of its govern- 
ment feeble and precarious? Is it true that the clergy of 
our times have pressed down the laity with an iron hand, 
and were in all places lighting up the fires of a savage per- 
secution? Did they by every fraud endeavour to increase 
their estates? Did they use to exceed the due demands on 
estates that were their own? Or, rigidly screwing up right 
into wrong, did they convert a legal claim into a vexatious 
extortion? When not possessed of power, were they filled 
with the vices of those who envy it? Were they inflamed 
with a violent, litigious spirit of controversy? Goaded on 
with the ambition of intellectual sovereignty, were they 
ready to fly in the face of all magistracy, to fire churches, to 
massacre the priests of other descriptions, to pull down 
altars, and to make their way over the ruins of subverted 
governments to an empire of doctrine, sometimes flattering, 
sometimes forcing, the consciences of men from the jurisdic- 
tion of public institutions into a submission to their personal 
authority, beginning with a claim of liberty and ending with 
an abuse of power? 

These, or some of these, were the vices objected, and not 
wholly without foundation, to several of the churchmen of 
former times, who belonged to the two great parties which 
then divided and distracted Europe. 

If there was in France, as in other countries there visibly 
‘is, a great abatement, rather than any increase of these vices, 


502 BURKE 


instead of loading the present clergy with the crimes of 
other men and the odious character of other times, in com- 
mon equity they ought to be praised, encouraged, and 
supported, in their departure from a spirit which disgraced 
their predecessors, and for having assumed a temper of mind 
and manners more suitable to their sacred function. 

When my occasions took me into France, towards the close 
of the late reign, the clergy, under all their forms, engaged a 
considerable part of my curiosity. So far from finding 
(except from one set of men, not then very numerous, though 
very active) the complaints and discontents against that body 
which some publications had given me reason to expect, I 
perceived little or no public or private uneasiness on their 
account. On further examination, I found the clergy, in 
general, persons of moderate minds and decorous manners: 
I include the seculars, and the regulars of both sexes. I 
had not the good fortune to know a great many of the par- 
ochial clergy: but in general I received a perfectly good 
account of their morals, and of their attention to their duties. 
With some of the higher clergy I had a personal acquaint- 
ance, and of the rest in that class a very good means of 
information. They were almost all of them persons of noble 
birth. They resembled others of their own rank: and where 
there was any difference, it was in their favour. They were 
more fully educated than the military noblesse,—so as by no 
means to disgrace their profession by ignorance, or by want 
of fitness for the exercise of their authority. They seemed 
to me, beyond the clerical character, liberal and open, with 
the hearts of gentlemen and men of honour, neither insolent 
nor servile in their manners and conduct. They seemed to 
me rather a superior class,—a set of men amongst whom you 
would not be surprised to find a Fénelon. I saw among 
the clergy in Paris (many of the description are not to be 
met with anywhere) men of great learning and candour; and 
I had reason to believe that this description was not confined 
to Paris. What I found in other places I know was acci- 
dental, and therefore to be presumed a fair sample. I spent 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 503 


a few days ina provincial town, where, in the absence of 
the bishop, I passed my evenings with three clergymen, his 
vicars-general, persons who would have done honour to any 
church. They were all well-informed ; two of them of deep, 
general, and extensive erudition, ancient and modern, Orien- 
tal and Western,—particularly in their own profession. 
They had a more extensive knowledge of our English divines 
than I expected ; and they entered into the genius of those 
writers with a critical accuracy. One of these gentlemen is 
since dead: the Abbé Morangis. I pay this tribute without 
reluctance to the memory of that noble, reverend, learned, 
and excellent person; and I should do the same with equal 
cheerfulness to the merits of the others, who I believe are 
still living, if I did not fear to hurt those whom I am unable 
to serve. 

Some of these ecclesiastics of rank are, by all titles, per- 
sons deserving of general respect. They are deserving of 
gratitude from me, and from many English. If this letter 
should ever come into their hands, I hope they will believe 
there are those of our nation who feel for their unmerited 
fall, and for the cruel confiscation of their fortunes, with no 
common sensibility. What I say of them is a testimony, as 
far as one feeble voice can go, which I owe totruth. When- 
ever the question of this unnatural persecution is concerned, 
I will pay it. No one shall prevent me from being just and 
grateful. The time is fitted for the duty; and it is particu- 
larly becoming to show our justice and gratitude, when those 
who have deserved well of us and of mankind are labouring 
under popular obloquy and the persecutions of oppressive 
power. 

You had before your Revolution about a hundred and 
twenty bishops. A few of them were men of eminent sanc- 
tity, and charity without limit. When we talk of the heroic, 
of course we talk of rare virtue. I believe the instances of 
eminent depravity may be as rare amongst them as those of 
transcendent goodness. Examples of avarice and of licen- 
tiousness may be picked out, I do not question it, by those 


504 BURKE 


who delight in the investigation which leads to such discov- 
eries. A man as old as I am will not be astonished that 
several, in every description, do not lead that perfect life of 
self-denial, with regard to wealth or to pleasure, which is 
wished for by all, by some expected, but by none exacted 
with more rigour than by those who are the most attentive to 
their own interests or the most indulgent to their own pas- 
sions. When I was in France, I am certain that the number 
of vicious prelates was not great. Certain individuals among 
them, not distinguishable for the regularity of their lives, 
made some amends for their want of the severe virtues in 
their possession of the liberal, and were endowed with quali- 
ties which made them useful in the Church and State. Iam 
told, that, with few exceptions, Louis the Sixteenth had been 
more attentive to character, in his promotions to that rank, 
than his immediate predecessor; and I believe (as some spirit 
of reform has prevailed through the whole reign) that it may 
betrue. But the present ruling power has shown a disposition 
to only plunder the Church. It has punished all prelates: 
which is to favour the vicious, at least in point of reputation. 
It has made a degrading pensionary establishment, to which 
no man of liberal ideas or liberal condition will destine his 
children. It must settle into the lowest classes of the peo- 
ple. As with you the inferior clergy are not numerous 
enough for their duties, as these duties are beyond measure 
minute and toilsome, as you have left no middle classes of 
clergy at their ease, in future nothing of science or erudition 
can exist in the Gallican Church. To complete the project, 
without the least attention to the rights of patrons, the As- 
sembly has provided in future an elective clergy : an arrange- 
_- ment which will drive out of the clerical profession all men 
of sobriety, all who can pretend to independence in their 
function or their conduct,—and which will throw the whole 
direction of the public mind into the hands of a set of licen- 
tious, bold, crafty, factious, flattering wretches, of such con- 
dition and such habits of life as will make their contemptible 
pensions (in comparison of which the stipend of an exciseman 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 505 


is lucrative and honourable) an object of low and illiberal in- 
trigue. Those officers whom they still call bishops are to be 
elected to a provision comparatively mean, through the same 
arts, (that is, electioneering arts,) by men of all religious 
tenets that are known or can be invented. The new law- 
givers have not ascertained anything whatsoever concerning 
their qualifications, relative either to doctrine or to morals, 
no more than they have done with regard to the subordinate 
clergy ; nor does it appear but that both the higher and the 
lower may, at their discretion, practise or preach any mode 
of religion or irreligion that they please. I do not yet see 
what the jurisdiction of bishops over their subordinates is to 
be, or whether they are to have any jurisdiction at all. 

In short, Sir, it seems to me that this new ecclesiastical 
establishment is intended only to be temporary, and prepar- 
atory to the utter abolition, under any of its forms, of the 
Christian religion, whenever the minds of men are prepared 
for this last stroke against it by the accomplishment of the 
plan for bringing its ministers into universal contempt. They 
who will not believe that the philosophical fanatics who 
guide in these matters have long entertained such a design 
are utterly ignorant of their character and proceedings. 
These enthusiasts do not scruple to avow their opinion, that 
a state can subsist without any religion better than with one, 
and that they are able to supply the place of any good which 
may be in it by a project of their own,—namely, by a sort of 
education they have imagined, founded in a knowledge of the 
physical wants of men, progressively carried to an enlight- 
ened self-interest, which, when well understood, they tell us, 
will identify with an interest more enlarged and public. The 
scheme of this education has been long known. Of late they 
distinguish it (as they have got an entirely new nomencla- 
ture of technical terms) by the name of a Civic Education. 

I hope their partisans in England (to whom I rather 
attribute very inconsiderate conduct than the ultimate object 
in this detestable design) will succeed neither in the pillage of 
the ecclesiastics nor in the introduction of a principle of 


506 BURKE 


popular election to our bishoprics and parochial cures. This, 
inthe present condition of the world, would be the last 
corruption of the Church, the utter ruin of the clerical char- 
acter, the most dangerous shock that the state ever received 
through a misunderstood arrangement of religion. I know 
well enough that the bishoprics and cures, under kingly and 
seigniorial patronage, as now they are in England, and as 
they have been lately in France, are sometimes acquired by 
unworthy methods; but the other mode of ecclesiastical can- 
vass subjects them infinitely more surely and more generally 
to all the evil arts of low ambition, which, operating on and 
through greater numbers, will produce mischief in proportion. 

Those of you who have robbed the clergy think that they 
shall easily reconcile their conduct to all Protestant nations, 
because the clergy whom they have thus plundered, degraded, 
and given over to mockery and scorn, are of the Roman 
Catholic, that is, of their own pretended persuasion. I have 
no doubt that some miserable bigots will be found here as 
well as elsewhere, who hate sects and parties different from 
their own more than they love the substance of religion, and 
who are more angry with those who differ from them in their 
particular plans and systems than displeased with those who 
attack the foundation of ourcommon hope. These men will 
write and speak on the subject in the manner that is to be 
expected from their temperand character. Burnet says, that, | 
when he was in France, in the year 1683, “ the method 
which carried over the men of the finest parts to Popery 
was this: they brought themselves to doubt of the whole 
Christian religion: when that was once done, it seemed a 
more indifferent thing of what side or form they continued 
outwardly.” If this was then the ecclesiastic policy of 
France, it is what they have since but too much reason to 
repent of. They preferred atheism to a form of religion not 
agreeable to their ideas. They succeeded in destroying that 
form; and atheism has succeeded in destroying them. Ican 
readily give credit to Burnet’s story; because I have ob- 
served too much of a similar spirit (fora little of it is “ much 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 507 


too much ’’) amongst ourselves. The humour, however, is 
not general. 

The teachers who reformed our religion in England bore 
no sort of resemblance to your present reforming doctors in 
Paris. Perhaps they were (like those whom they opposed) 
rather more than could be wished under the influence of a 
party spirit; but they were most sincere believers; men of 
the most fervent and exalted piety ; ready to die (as some 
of them did die) like true heroes in defense of their particu- 
lar ideas of Christianity,—as they would with equal fortitude, 
and more cheerfully, for that stock of general truth for the 
branches of which they contended with their blood. These 
men would have disavowed with horror those wretches who 
claimed a fellowship with them upon no other titles than 
those of their having pillaged the persons with whom they 
maintained controversies, and their having despised the 
common religion, for the purity of which they exerted them- 
selves with a zeal which unequivocally bespoke their highest 
reverence for the substance of that system which they 
wished to reform. Many of their descendants have retained 
the same zeal, but (as less engaged in conflict) with more 
moderation. They do not forget that justice and mercy 
are substantial parts of religion. Impious men do not 
recommend themselves to their communion by iniquity and 
cruelty towards any description of their fellow-creatures. 

We hear these new teachers continually boasting of their 
spirit of toleration. That those persons should tolerate all 
opinions, who think none to be of estimation, is a matter of 
small merit. Equal neglect is not impartial kindness. The 
species of benevolence which arises from contempt is no 
true charity. There are in England abundance of men who 
tolerate in the true spirit of toleration. They think the 
dogmas of religion, though in different degrees, are all of 
moment, and that amongst them there is, as amongst all 
things of value, a just ground of preference. They favour, 
therefore, and they tolerate. They tolerate, not because 
they despise opinions, but because they respect justice. 


508 BURKE 


They would reverently and affectionately protect all religions, 
because they love and venerate the great principle upon 
which they all agree, and the great object to which they 
are all directed. They begin more and more plainly to dis- 
cern that we have all a common cause, as against a common 
enemy. They will not be so misled by the spirit of faction 
as not to distinguish what is done in favour of their subdivi- 
sion from those acts of hostility which, through some par- 
ticular description, are aimed at the whole corps in which 
they themselves, under another denomination, are included. 
It is impossible for me to say what may be the character of 
every description of men amongst us. But I speak for the 
greater part; and forthem, I must tell you, that sacrilege is 
nopart of their doctrine of good works; that, so far from 
calling you into their fellowship on such title, if your pro- 
fessors are admitted to their communion, they must care- 
fully conceal their doctrine of the lawfulness of the proscription 
of innocent men, and that they must make restitution of 
all stolen goods whatsoever. Till then they are none of 
ours. 

You may suppose that we do not approve your confisca- 
tion of the revenues of bishops, and deans, and chapters, and 
parochial clergy possessing independent estates arising from 
land, because we have the same sort of establishment in 
England. That objection, you will say, can not hold astothe 
confiscation of the goods of monks and nuns, and the aboli- 
tion of their order. It is true that this particular part of 
your general confiscation does not affect England, as a pre- 
cedent in point; but the reason applies, and it goes a great 
way. The Long Parliament confiscated the lands of deans 
and chaptersin England on the same ideas upon which your 
Assembly set to sale the lands of the monastic orders. But 
it is in the principle of injustice that the danger lies, and not 
in the description of persons on whom it is first exercised. 
I see, in a country very near us, a course of policy pursued, 
which sets justice,the common concern of mankind,at defiance. 
With the National Assembly of France possession is nothing, 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 509 


law and usage are nothing. I see the National Assembly 
openly reprobate the doctrine of prescription, which one of 
the greatest of their own lawyers * tells us, with great truth, 
is a part of the law of Nature. He tells us that the positive 
ascertainment of its limits, and its security from invasion, 
were among the causes for which civil society itself has been 
instituted. If prescription be once shaken, no species of 
property is secure, when it once becomes an object large 
enough to tempt the cupidity of indigent power. I see a 
practise perfectly correspondent to their contempt of this 
great fundamental part of natural law. I see the confisca- 
tors begin with bishops, and chapters, and monasteries; but 
I do not see themend there. I see the princes of the blood, 
who, by the oldest usages of that kingdom, held large 
landed estates, (hardly with the compliment of a debate,) 
deprived of their possessions, and, in lieu of their stable, in- 
dependent property, reduced to the hope of some precarious 
charitable pension at the pleasure of an Assembly, which of 
course will pay little regard to the rights of pensioners at 
pleasure, when it despises those of legal proprietors. Flushed 
with the insolence of their first inglorious victories, and 
pressed by the distresses caused by their lust of unhallowed 
lucre, disappointed, but not discouraged, they have at length 
ventured completely to subvert all property of all descrip- 
tions throughout the extent of agreatkingdom. They have 
compelled all men, in all transactions of commerce, in the 
disposal of lands, in civil dealing, and through the whole 
communion of life, to accept, as perfect payment and good 
and lawful tender, the symbols of their speculations on a 
projected sale of their plunder. What vestiges of liberty or 
property have they left? The tenant-right of a cabbage-gar- 
den, a year’s interest in a hovel, the good-will of an ale-house 
or a baker’s shop, the very shadow ofa constructive property, 
are more ceremoniously treated in our Parliament than with 
you the oldest and most valuable landed possessions, in the 
hands of the most respectable personages, or than the whole 
body of the moneyed and commercial interest of your 


510 BURKE 


country. We entertain a high opinion of the legislative au- 
thority ; but we have never dreamt that Parliaments had any 
right whatever to violate property, to overrule prescription, 
or to force a currency of their own fiction in the place of that 
which is real, and recognized by the law of nations. But 
you, who began with refusing to submit to the most mod- 
erate restraints, have ended by establishing an unheard-of 
despotism. I find the ground upon which your confiscators 
go is this: that, indeed, their proceedings could not be 
supported in a court of justice, but that the rules of prescrip- 
tion cannot bind a legislative assembly. So that this 
legislative assembly of a free nation sits, not for the security, 
but for the destruction of property,—and not of property 
only, but of every rule and maxim which can give it stability, 
and of those instruments which can alone give it circulation. 

When the Anabaptists of Miinster, in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, had filled Germany with confusion, by their system of 
leveling, and their wild opinions concerning property, to 
what country in Europe did not the progress of their fury 
furnish just cause of alarm? Of all things, wisdom is the 
most terrified with epidemical fanaticism, because of all 
enemies it is that against which she is the least able to fur- 
nish any kind of resource. We can not be ignorant of the 
spirit of atheistical fanaticism, that is inspired by a multitude 
of writings dispersed with incredible assiduity and expense, 
and by sermons delivered in all the streets and places of 
public resort in Paris. These writings and sermons have 
filled the populace with a black and savage atrocity of mind, 
which supersedes in them the common feelings of Nature, 
as well as all sentiments of morality and religion ; insomuch 
that these wretches are induced to bear with a sullen patience 
the intolerable distresses brought upon them by the violent 
convulsions and permutations that have been made in prop- 
erty.” The spirit of proselytism attends this spirit of fanati- 
cism. They have societies to cabal and correspond at home 
and abroad for the propagation of their tenets. The republic 
of Berne, one of the happiest, the most prosperous, and the 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION ee 


best-governed countries upon earth, is one of the great objects 
at the destruction of which they aim. Iam told they have © 
in some measure succeeded in sowing there the seeds of dis- 
content. They are busy throughout Germany. Spain and 
Italy have not been untried. England is not left out of the 
comprehensive scheme of their malignant charity: and in 
England we find those who stretch out their arms to them, 
who recommend their example from more than one pulpit, 
and who choose, in more than one periodical meeting, pub- 
licly to correspond with them, to applaud them, and to hold 
them up as objects for imitation; who receive from them 
tokens of confraternity, and standards consecrated amidst 
their rites and mysteries; #4 who suggest to them leagues of 
perpetual amity, at the very time when the power to which 
our Constitution has exclusively delegated the federative 
capacity of this kingdom may find it expedient to make war 
upon them. 

It is not the confiscation of our Church property from this 
example in France that I dread, though I think this would 
be no trifling evil. The great source of my solicitude is, lest 
it should ever be considered in England as the policy ofa 
state to seek a resource in confiscations of any kind, or that 
any one description of citizens should be brought to regard 
any of the others as their proper prey.*? Nations are wading 
deeper and deeper into an ocean of boundless debt. Public 
debts, which at first were a security to governments, by inter- 
esting many in the public tranquillity, are likely in their 
excess to become the means of their subversion. If govern- 
ments provide for these debts by heavy impositions, they 
perish by becoming odious to the people. If they do not 
provide for them, they will be undone by the efforts of the 
most: dangerous of all parties: I mean an extensive, discon- 
tented moneyed interest, injured and not destroyed. The 
men who compose this interest look for their security, in the 
first instance, to the fidelity of government; in the second, 
to its power. If they find the old governments effete, worn 
out, and with their springs relaxed, so as not to be of sufficient 


512 BURKE 


vigour for their purposes, they may seek new ones that shall 
be possessed of more energy ; and this energy will be derived, 
not from an acquisition of resources, but from a contempt 
of justice. Revolutions are favourable to confiscation ; and 
it is impossible to know under what obnoxious names the 
next confiscations will be authorized. I am sure that the 
principles predominant in France extend to very many per- 
sons, and descriptions of persons, in all countries, who think 
their innoxious indolence their security. This kind of inno- 
cence in proprietors may be argued into inutility ; and inutility 
into an unfitness for their estates. Many parts of Europeare 
in open disorder. In many others there is a hollow murmur- 
ing under ground ; a confused movement is felt, that threatens 
a general earthquake in the political world. Already con- 
federacies and correspondences of the most extraordinary 
nature are forming in several countries.* In such a state of 
things we ought to hold ourselves upon our guard. In all 
mutations (if mutations must be) the circumstance which 
will serve most to blunt the edge of their mischief, and to 
promote what good may be in them, is, that they should 
find us with our minds tenacious of justice and tender of 
property. 

But it will be argued, that this confiscation in France ought 
not to alarm other nations. They say it is not made from 
wanton rapacity ; that it isa great measure of national policy, 
adopted to remove an extensive, inveterate, superstitious 
mischief.—It is with the greatest difficulty that I am able to 
separate policy from justice. Justice is itself the great stand- 
ing policy of civil society ; and any eminent departure from 
it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being 
no policy at all. 

When men are encouraged to go into a certain mode of 
life by the existing laws, and protected in that mode as ina 
lawful occupation,—when they have accommodated all their 
ideas and all their habits to it,—when the law had long made 
their adherence to its rules a ground of reputation, and their 
departure from them a ground of disgrace and even of pen- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 513 


alty,—I am sure it is unjust in legislature, by an arbitrary 
act, to offer a sudden violence to their minds and their feel- 
ings, forcibly to degrade them from their state and condition, 
and to stigmatize with shame and infamy that character and 
those customs which before had been made the measure of 
their happiness and honour. If to this be added an expul- 
sion from their habitations and a confiscation of all their 
goods, I am not sagacious enough to discover how this des- 
potic sport made of the feelings, consciences, prejudices, and 
properties of men can be discriminated from the rankest 
tyranny. 

If the injustice of the course pursued in France be clear, 
the policy of the measure, that is, the public benefit to be 
expected from it, ought to be at least as evident, and at 
least as important. To aman who acts under the influence 
of no passion, who has nothing in view in his projects but 
the public good, a great difference will immediately strike 
him, between what policy would dictate on the original in- 
troduction of such institutions, and ona question of their 
total abolition, where they have cast their roots wide and 
deep, and where, by long habit, things more valuable than 
themselves are so adapted to them, and in a manner inter- 
woven with them, that the one can not be destroyed without 
notably impairing the other. He might be embarrassed, if 
the case were really such as sophisters represent it in their 
paltry style of debating. But in this, as in most questions 
of state, there is a middle. There is something else than the 
mere alternative of absolute destruction or unreformed ex- 
istence. Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna. This is, in my 
opinion, a rule of profound sense, and ought never to depart 
from the mind of an honest reformer. I can not conceive 
how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of pre- 
sumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, 
upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases. A man 
full of warm, speculative benevolence may wish his society 
otherwise constituted than he finds it; but a good patriot, 
and a true politician, always considers how he shall make the 

33 


514 BURKE 


most of the existing materials of his country. <A disposition 
to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would 
be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar 
in the conception, perilous in the execution. 

There are moments in the fortune of states, when particu- 
lar men are called to make improvements by great mental 
exertion. In those moments, even when they seem to enjoy 
the confidence of their prince and country, and to be invested 
with full authority, they have not always apt instruments. 
A politician, to do great things, looks for a power, what our 
workmen call a purchase; and if he finds that power, in poli- 
tics as in mechanics, he can not be at a loss to apply it. In 
the monastic institutions, in my opinion, was found a great 
power for the mechanism of politic benevolence. There were 
revenues with a public direction; there were men wholly set 
apart and dedicated to public purposes, without any other 
than public ties and public principles,—men without the 
possibility of converting the estate of the community into a 
private fortune,—men denied to self-interests, whose avarice 
is for some community,—men to whom personal poverty is 
honour, and implicit obedience stands in the place of freedom. 
In vain shall a man look to the possibility of making such 
things when he wants them. The winds blow as they list. 
These institutions are the products of enthusiasm ; they are 
the instruments of wisdom. Wisdomcan not create materials; 
they are the gifts of Nature or of chance; her pride is in the 
use. The perennial existence of bodies corporate and their 
fortunes are things particularly suited to a man who has long 
views,—who meditates designs that require time in fashion- 
ing, and which propose duration when they are accomplished. 
He is not deserving to rank high, or even to be mentioned 
in the order of great statesmen, who, having obtained the 
command and direction of such a power as existed in the 
wealth, the discipline, and the habits of such corporations as 
those which you have rashly destroyed, can not find any way 
of converting it to the great and lasting benefit of his country. 
On the view of this subject, a thousand uses suggest them- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 515 


selves to a contriving mind. To destroy any power growing 
wild from the rank productive force of the human mind is 
almost tantamount, in the moral world, to the destruction 
of the apparently active properties of bodies in the material. 
It would be like the attempt to destroy (if it were in our 
competence to destroy) the expansive force of fixed air in 
nitre, or the power of steam, or of electricity, or of magnet- 
ism. These energies always existed in Nature, and they 
were always discernible. They seemed, some of them un- 
serviceable, some noxious, some no better than a sport to 
children,—until contemplative ability, combining with prac- 
tic skill, tamed their wild nature, subdued them to use, and 
rendered them at once the most powerful and the most tract- 
able agents, in subservience to the great views and designs 
of men. Did fifty thousand persons, whose mental and 
whose bodily labour you might direct, and so many hundred 
thousand a year of a revenue, which was neither lazy nor 
superstitious, appear too big for your abilities to wield ? Had 
you no way of using the men, but by converting monks into 
pensioners? Had you no way of turning the revenue to ac- 
count, but through the improvident resource of a spendthrift 
sale? If you were thus destitute of mental funds, the pro- 
ceeding is in its natural course. Your politicians do not 
understand their trade ; and therefore they sell their tools. 
But the institutions savour of superstition in their very 
principle, and they nourish it by a permanent and standing 
influence.—This I do not mean to dispute; but this ought 
not to hinder you from deriving from superstition itself any 
resources which may thence be furnished for the public ad- 
vantage. You derive benefits from many dispositions and 
many passions of the human mind which are of as doubtful 
a colour, in the moral eye, as superstition itself. It was your 
business to correct and mitigate everything which was nox- 
ious in this passion, as in all the passions. But is supersti- 
tion the greatest of all possible vices? In its possible excess 
I think it becomes a very great evil. It is, however, a moral 
subject, and of course admits of all degrees and all modifica- 


516 BURKE 


tions. Superstition is the religion of feeble minds; and they 
must be tolerated in an intermixture of it, in some trifling 
or some enthusiastic shape or other, else you will deprive 
weak minds of a resource found necessary to the strongest. 
The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obed- 
ience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a 
confidence in His declarations, and in imitation of His per- 
fections. The rest is our own. It may be prejudicial to the 
great end,—it may be auxiliary. Wise men, who, as such, 
are not admirers, (not admirers at least of the munera terre,) 
are not violently attached to these things, nor do they 
violently hate them. Wisdom is not the most severe cor- 
rector of folly. They are the rival follies which mutually 
wage so unrelenting a war, and which make so cruel a use 
of their advantages, as they can happen to engage the im- 
moderate vulgar, on the one side or the other, in their 
quarrels.—Prudence would be neuter; but if, in the conten- 
tion between fond attachment and fierce antipathy concern- 
ing things in their nature not made to produce such heats, a 
prudent man were obliged to make a choice of what errors 
and excesses of enthusiasm he would condemn or bear, per- 
haps he would think the superstition which builds to be 
more tolerable than that which demolishes,—that which 
adorns a country, than that which deforms it,—that which 
endows, than that which plunders,—that which disposes to 
mistaken beneficence, than that which stimulates to real in- 
justice,—that which leads a man to refuse to himself lawful 
pleasures, than that which snatches from others the scanty 
subsistence of their self-denial. Such, I think, is very nearly 
the state of the question between the ancient founders of 
monkish superstition and the superstition of the pretended 
philosophers of the hour. 

For the present I postpone all consideration of the sup- 
posed public profit of the sale, which, however, I conceive to 
be perfectly delusive. I shall here only consider it as a 
transfer of property. On the policy of that transfer I shall 
trouble you with a few thoughts. 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 517 


In every prosperous community something more is pro- 
duced than goes to the immediate support of the producer. 
This surplus forms the income of the landed capitalist. It 
will be spent by a proprietor who does not labour. But this 
idleness is itself the spring of labour, this repose the spur to 
industry. The only concern for the state is, that the capital 
taken in rent from the land should be returned again to the 
industry from whence it came, and that its expenditure 
should be with the least possible detriment to the morals of 
those who expend it and to those of the people to whom it is 
returned. 

In all the views of receipt, expenditure, and personal em- 
ployment, a sober legislator would carefully compare the 
possessor whom he was recommended to expel with the 
stranger who was proposed to fill his place. Before the in- 
conveniences are incurred which must attend all violent revol- 
utions in property through extensive confiscation, we ought 
to have some rational assurance that the purchasers of the 
confiscated property will be ina considerable degree more 
laborious, more virtuous, more sober, less disposed to extort 
an unreasonable proportion of the gains of the labourer, or 
to consume on themselves a larger share than is fit for the 
measure of an individual,—or that they should be qualified 
to dispense the surplus in a more steady and equal mode, so 
as to answer the purposes of a politic expenditure, than the 
old possessors, call those possessors bishops, or canons, or 
commendatory abbots, or monks, or what you please. The 
monks are lazy. Be it so. Suppose them no otherwise 
employed than by singing in the choir. They areas usefully 
employed as those who neither sing nor say,—as usefully 
even as those who sing upon the stage. They are as use- 
fully employed as if they worked from dawn to dark in the 
innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly, unmanly, and 
often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations to 
which by the social economy so many wretches are inevi- 
tably doomed. If it were not generally pernicious to disturb 
the natural course of things, and to impede in any degree 


518 BURKE 


the great wheel of circulation which is turned by the strangely 
directed labour of these unhappy people, I should be infin- 
itely more inclined forcibly to rescue them from their mis- 
erable industry than violently to disturb the tranquil repose 
of monastic quietude. Humanity, and perhaps policy, might 
better justify me in the one than in the other. It is a sub- 
ject on which I have often reflected, and never reflected 
without feeling from it. I am sure that no consideration, 
except the necessity of submitting to the yoke of luxury 
and the despotism of fancy, who in their own imperious way 
will distribute the surplus product of the soil, can justify the 
toleration of such trades and employments in a well-regu- 
lated state. But for this purpose of distribution, it seems 
to me that the idle expenses of monks are quite as well 
directed as the idle expenses of us lay loiterers. 

When the advantages of the possession and of the project 
are on apar, there is nomotive forachange. But inthe pres- 
ent case, perhaps, they are not upon a par, and the differ- 
ence is in favourof the possession. It does not appear to 
me that the expenses of those whom you are going to expel 
do in fact take a course so directly and so generally leading 
to vitiate and degrade and render miserable those through 
whom they pass as the expenses of those favourites whom 
you are intruding into their houses. Why should the expen- 
diture of a great landed property, which is a dispersion of 
the surplus product of the soil, appear intolerable to you or 
to me, when it takes its course through the accumulation of 
vast libraries, which are the history of the force and weak- 
ness of the human mind,—through great collections of an- 
cient records, medals, and coins, which attest and explain 
laws and customs,—through paintings and statues, that, by 
imitating Nature, seem to extend the limits of creation,— 
through grand monuments of the dead, which continue the 
regards and connections of life beyond the grave,—through 
collections of the specimens of Nature, which become a 
representative assembly of all the classes and families of the 
world, that by disposition facilitate, and by exciting curi- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 519 


osity open, the avenues to science? If by great permanent 
establishments all these objects of expense are better secured 
from the inconstant sport of personal caprice and personal 
extravagance, are they worse than ifthe same tastes pre- 
vailed in scattered individuals? Does not the sweat of the 
mason and carpenter, who toil in order to partake the sweat 
of the peasant, flow as pleasantly and as salubriously in the 
construction and repair of the majestic edifices of religion as 
in the painted booths and sordid sties of vice and luxury? as 
honourably and as profitably in repairing those sacred works 
which grow hoary with innumerable years as on the mo- 
mentary receptacles of transient voluptuousness,—in opera- 
houses, and brothels, and gaming-houses, and club-houses, 
and obelisks in the Champ de Mars? Is the surplus product 
of the olive and the vine worse employed in the frugal sus- 
tenance of persons whom the fictions of a pious imagination 
raise to dignity by construing in the service of God than in 
pampering the innumerable multitude of those who are de- 
graded by being made useless domestics, subservient to the 
pride of man? Are the decorations of temples an expen- 
diture less worthy a wise man than ribbons, and laces, and 
national cockades, and petit maisons, and petit soupers, and 
all the innumerable fopperies and follies in which opulence 
sports away the burden of its superfluity ? 

We tolerate even these,—not from love of them, but for 
fear of worse. We tolerate them, because property and lib- 
erty, to a degree, require that toleration. But why proscribe 
the other, and surely, in every point of view, the more laud- 
able use of estates? Why, through the violation of all prop- 
erty, through an outrage upon every principle of liberty, 
forcibly carry them from the better to the worse ? 

This comparison between the new individuals and the old 
corps is made upon a supposition that no reform could be 
made in the latter. But, in a question of reformation, I 
always consider corporate bodies,whether sole or consisting of 
many,to be much more susceptible of a public direction,by the 
power of the state, in the use of their property, and in the 


520 BURKE 


regulation of modes and habits of life in their members, than 
private citizens ever can be, or perhaps ought to be; and 
this seems to mea very material consideration for those who 
undertake anything which merits the name of a politic en- 
terprise.—So far as to the estates of monasteries. 

With regard to the estates possessed by bishops and can- 
ons and commendatory abbots, I cannot find out for what 
reason some landed estates may not be held otherwise than 
by inheritance. Can any philosophic spoiler undertake to 
demonstrate the positive or the comparative evil of having 
acertain, and that, too, a large, portion of landed property 
passing in succession through persons whose title to it is, 
always in theory and often in fact, an eminent degree of 
piety, morals, and learning ; a property which by its destina- 
tion, in their turn, and on the score of merit, gives to the 
noblest families renovation and support, to the lowest the 
means of dignity and elevation ; a property, the tenure of 
which is the performance of some duty, (whatever value you 
may choose to set upon that duty,) and the character of 
whose proprietors demands at least an exterior decorum and 
gravity of manners,—who are to exercise a generous, but tem- 
perate hospitality,— part of whose income they are to con- 
sider as a trust for charity,—and who, even when they fail in 
their trust, when they slide from their character, and degen- 
erate into a mere common secular nobleman or gentleman, 
are in no respect worse than those who may succeed them in 
their forfeited possessions? Is it better that estates should be 
held by those who have no duty than by those who have one? 
by those whose character and destination point to virtues 
than by those who have no rule and direction in the expen- 
diture of their estates but their own will and appetite? Nor 
are these estates held altogether in the character or with the 
evils supposed inherent in mortmain. They passfrom hand 
to hand with a more rapid circulation than any other. No 
excess is good, and therefore too great a proportion of landed 
property may be held officially for life; but it does not seem 
to me of material injury to any commonwealth that there 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 521 


should exist some estates that have a chance of being acquired 
by other means than the previous acquisition of money. 

This letter is grown to a great length, though it is, indeed, 
short with regard to the infinite extent of the subject. Vari- 
ous avocations have from time to time called my mind from 
the subject. I was not sorry to give myself leisure to ob- 
serve whether in the proceedings of the National Assembly 
I might not find reasons to change or to qualify some of 
my first sentiments. Everything has confirmed me more 
strongly in my first opinions. It was my original purpose 
to take a view of the principles of the National Assembly 
with regard to the great and fundamental establishments, 
and to compare the whole of what you have substituted in 
the place of what you have destroyed with the several mem- 
bers of our British Constitution. But this plan is of greater 
extent than at first I computed, and I find that you have 
little desire to take the advantage of any examples. At 
present I must content myself with some remarks upon your 
establishments, reserving for another time what I proposed 
to say concerning the spirit of our British monarchy, aristo- 
cracy, and democracy, as practically they exist. 

I have taken a view of what has been done by the govern- 
ing powerin France. I have certainly spoken of it with 
freedom. Those whose principle it is to despise the ancient 
permanent sense of mankind, and to set up a scheme of 
society on new principles, must naturally expect that such 
of us who think better of the judgment of the human race 
than of theirs should consider both them and their devices 
as men and schemes upon their trial. They must take it for 
granted that we attend much to their reason, but not at all 
to their authority. -They have not one of the great influenc- 
ing prejudices of mankind in their favour. They avow their 
hostility to opinion. Of course they must expect no sup- 
port from that influence, which, with every other authority, 
they have deposed from the seat of its jurisdiction. 

I can never consider this Assembly as anything else than 
a voluntary association of men who have availed themselves 


522 BURKE 


of circumstances to seize upon the power of the state. They 
have not the sanction and authority of the character under 
which they first met. They have assumed another of a very 
different nature, and have completely altered and inverted 
all the relations in which they originally stood. They do 
not hold the authority they exercise under any constitutional 
law of the state. They have departed from the instructions 
of the people by whom they were sent; which instructions, 
as the Assembly did not act in virtue of any ancient usage 
or settled law, were the sole source of their authority. The 
most considerable of their acts have not been done by great 
majorities; and in this sort of near divisions, which carry 
only the constructive authority of the whole, strangers will 
consider reasons as well as resolutions. 

If they had set up this new, experimental government as 
a necessary substitute for an expelled tyranny, mankind 
would anticipate the time of prescription, which through 
long usage mellows into legality governments that were vio- 
lent in their commencement. All those who have affections 
which lead them to the conservation of civil order would 
recognize, even in its cradle, the child as legitimate, which 
has been produced from those principles of cogent expediency 
to which all just governments owe their birth, and on which 
they justify theircontinuance. But they will be late and re- 
luctant in giving any sort of countenance to the operations 
of a power which has derived its birth from no law and no 
necessity, but which, on the contrary, has had its origin in 
those vices and sinister practises by which the social union 
is often disturbed and sometimes destroyed. This Assembly 
has hardly a year’s prescription. We have their own word 
for it that they have made a revolution. To make a revolu- 
tion is a measure which, prima fronte, requires an apology. 
To make a revolution is to subvert the ancient state of our 
country ; and no common reasons are called for to justify so 
violent a proceeding. The sense of mankind authorizes us 
to examine into the mode of acquiring new power, and to 
criticise on the use that is made of it, with less awe and re- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 523 


verence than that which is usually conceded to a settled and 
recognized authority. 

In obtaining and securing their power, the Assembly pro- 
ceeds upon principles the most opposite from those which 
appear to direct them in the use of it. An observation on 
this difference will let us into the true spirit of their conduct. 
Everything which they have done, or continue to do, in 
order to obtain and keep their power, is by the most com- 
mon arts. They proceed exactly as their ancestors of ambi- 
tion have done before them. Trace them through all their 
artifices, frauds, and violences, you can find nothing at all 
that isnew. They follow precedents and examples with the 
punctilious exactness of a pleader. They never depart an iota 
from the authentic formulas of tyranny and usurpation. But 
in all the regulations relative to the public good the spirit has 
been the very reverse ofthis. Therethey commit the wholeto 
the mercy of untried speculations ; they abandon the dearest 
interests of the public to those loose theories to which none 
of them would choose to trust the slightest of his private 
concerns, They make this difference, because in their desire 
of obtaining and securing power they are thoroughly in ear- 
nest; there they travel in the beaten road. The public in- 
terests, because about them they have no real solicitude, 
they abandon wholly to chance: I say to chance, because 
their schemes have nothing in experience to prove their 
tendency beneficial. 

We must always see with a pity not unmixed with respect 
the errors of those who are timid and doubtful of themselves 
with regard to points wherein the happiness of mankind is 
concerned. But in these gentlemen there is nothing of the 
tender parental solicitude which fears to cut up the infant 
for the sake of an experiment. In the vastness of their 
promises and the confidence of their predictions they far 
outdo all the boasting of empirics. The arrogance of their 
pretensions in a manner provokes and challenges us to an 
inquiry into their foundation. 

I am convinced that there are men of considerable parts 


524 BURKE 


among the popular leaders in the National Assembly. Some 
of them display eloquence in their speeches and their writ- 
ings. This cannot be without powerful and cultivated 
talents. But eloquence may exist without a proportion- 
able degree of wisdom. When I speak of ability, I am 
obliged to distinguish. What they have done towards 
the support of their system bespeaks no ordinary men. In 
the system itself, taken as the scheme of a republic con- 
structed for procuring the prosperity and security of the 
citizen, and for promoting the strength and grandeur of the 
state, I confess myself unable to find out anything which 
displays, in a single instance, the work of a comprehensive 
and disposing mind, or even the provisions of a vulgar pru- 
dence. Their purpose everywhere seems to have been to 
evade and slip aside from difficulty. This it has been the 
glory of the great masters in all the arts to confront, and to 
overcome,—and when they had overcome the first difficulty, 
to turn it into an instrument for new conquests over new 
difficulties: thus to enable them to extend the empire of 
their science, and even to push forward, beyond the reach 
of their original thoughts, the landmarks of the human un- 
derstanding itself. Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over 
us by the supreme ordinance of a parental Guardian and 
Legislator, who knows us better than we know ourselves, 
as He loves us better too. ‘‘ Pater ipse colendi haud facilem 
esse viam voluit.” He that wrestles with us strengthens our 
nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. 
This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an in- 
timate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to con- 
sider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be super- 
ficial. It is the want of nerves of understanding for such a 
task, it is the degenerate fondness for tricking short-cuts and 
little fallacious facilities, that has in so many parts of the 
world created governments with arbitrary powers. They 
have created the late arbitrary monarchy of France. They 
have created the arbitrary republic of Paris. With them de- 
fects in wisdom are to be supplied by the plenitude of force. 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 525 


They get nothing by it. Commencing their labours on a 
principle of sloth, they have the common fortune of slothful 
men. The difficulties which they rather had eluded than 
escaped, meet them again in their course ; they multiply and 
thicken on them ; they are involved, through a labyrinth of 
confused detail, in an industry without limit and without 
direction ; and in conclusion, the whole of their work becomes 
feeble, vicious, and insecure. 

It is this inability to wrestle with difficulty which has 
obliged the arbitrary Assembly of France to commence their 
schemes of reform with abolition and total destruction.*# 
But is it in destroying and pulling down that skill is dis- 
played? Your mob can do this as well at least as your as- 
semblies. The shallowest understanding, the rudest hand, 
is more than equal to that task. Rage and frenzy will pull 
down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and 
foresight can build up ina hundred years. The errors and 
defects of old establishments are visible and palpable. It 
calls for little ability to point them out ; and where absolute 
power is given, it requires but a word wholly to abolish the 
vice and the establishment together. The same lazy, but 
restless disposition, which loves sloth and hates quiet, directs 
these politicians, when they come to work for supplying the 
place of what they have destroyed. To make everything 
the reverse of what they have seen is quite as easy as to des- 
troy. No difficulties occur in what has never been tried. 
Criticism is almost baffled in discovering the defects of what 
has not existed; and eager enthusiasm and cheating hope 
have all the wide field of imagination, in which they may 
expatiate with little or no opposition. 

At once to preserve and to reform is quite another thing. 
When the useful parts of an old establishment are kept, and 
what is superadded is to be fitted to what is retained, a vig- 
orous mind, steady, persevering attention, various powers of 
comparison and combination, and the resources of an under- 
standing fruitful in expedients are to be exercised ; they are 
to be exercised in a continued conflict with the combined 


526 BURKE 


force of opposite vices, with the obstinacy that rejects all 
improvement, and the levity thatis fatigued and disgusted 
with everything of which it is in possession. But you may 
object,—“ A process of this kind is slow. It is not fit for an 
Assembly which glories in performing in a few months the 
work of ages. Such a mode of reforming, possibly, might 
take up many years.” Without question it might; and it 
ought. It is one of the excellences of a method in which 
time is amongst the assistants, that its operation is slow, and 
in some cases almost imperceptible. If circumspection and 
caution are a part of wisdom, when we work only upon in- 
animate matter, surely they become a part of duty too, when 
the subject of our demolition and construction is not brick 
and timber, but sentient beings, by the sudden alteration of 
whose state, condition, and habits, multitudes may be ren- 
dered miserable. But it seems as if it were the prevalent 
opinion in Paris, that an unfeeling heart and an undoubting 
confidence are the sole qualifications for a perfect legislator. 
Far different are my ideas of that high office. The true law- 
giver ought to have a heart full of sensibility. He ought to 
love and respect his kind, and to fear himself. It may beal- 
lowed to his temperament to catch his ultimate object with an 
intuitive glance; but his movements towards it ought to be 
deliberate. Political arrangement, as it is a work for social 
ends, isto be only wrought by social means. There mind must 
conspire with mind. Time is required to produce that union 
of minds which alone can produce all the good we aim at. 
Our patience will achieve more than our force. If I might 
venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion in Paris, 
—I mean to experience,—I should tell you, that in my course 
I have known, and, according to my measure, have co-oper- 
ated with great men; and I have never yet seen any plan 
which has not been mended by the observations of those 
who were much inferior in understanding to the person who 
took the lead in the business. By a slow, but well-sustained 
progress, the effect of each step is watched; the good or ill 
success of the first gives light to us in the second; and so, 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 527 


from light to light, we are conducted with safety through 
the whole series. We see that the parts of the system do 
not clash. The evils latent in the most promising contriv- 
ances are provided for as they arise. One advantage is as 
little as possible sacrificed to another. We compensate, we 
reconcile, we balance. We are enabled to unite into a con- 
sistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles 
that are found in the minds and affairs of men. From hence 
arises, not an excellence in simplicity, but one far superior, 
an excellence in composition. Where the great interests of 
mankind are concerned through a long succession of genera- 
tions, that succession ought to be admitted into some share 
in the councils which are so deeply to affect them. If justice 
requires this, the work itself requires the aid of more minds 
than one age can furnish. It is from this view of things that 
the best legislators have been often satisfied with the estab- 
lishment of some sure, solid, and ruling principle in govern- 
ment,—a power like that which some of the philosophers 
have called a plastic Nature; and having fixed the principle, 
they have left it afterwards to its own operation. 

To proceed in this manner, that is, to proceed with a pre- 
siding principle and prolific energy, is with me the criterion 
of profound wisdom. What your politicians think the marks 
of a bold, hardy genius are only proofs of a deplorable want 
of ability. By their violent haste, and their defiance of the 
process of Nature, they are delivered over blindly to every 
projector and adventurer, to every alchemist and empiric. 
They despair of turning to account anything that is common. 
Diet is nothing in their system of remedy. The worst of it 
is, that this their despair of curing common distempers by 
regular methods arises not only from defect of comprehension, 
but, I fear, from some malignity of disposition. Your legis- 
lators seem to have taken their opinions of all professions, 
ranks and offices from the declamations and buffooneries of 
satirists,—who would themselves be astonished, if they were 
held to the letter of their own descriptions. By listening only 
to these, your leaders regard all things only on the side of their 


528 BURKE 


vices and faults, and view those vices and faults under every 
colour of exaggeration. Itisundoubtedly true, though it may 
seem paradoxical—but, in general, those who are habitually 
employed in finding and displaying faults are unqualified for 
the work of reformation ; because their minds are not only un- 
furnished with patterns of the fair and good, but by habit they 
come to take no delight in the contemplation of those things. 
By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little. 
It is therefore not wonderful that they should be indisposed 
and unable to serve them. From hence arises the com- 
plexional disposition of some of your guides to pull every- 
thing in pieces. At this malicious game they display the 
whole of their quadrimanous activity. As to the rest, the 
paradoxes of eloquent writers, brought forth purely as a 
sport of fancy, to try their talents, to rouse attention, and 
excite surprise, are taken up by these gentlemen, not in the 
spirit of the original authors, as means of cultivating their 
taste and improving their style: these paradoxes become with 
them serious grounds of action, upon which they proceed in 
regulating the most important concerns of the state. Cicero 
ludicrously describes Cato as endeavouring to act in the com- 
monwealth upon the school paradoxes which exercised the 
wits of the junior students in the Stoic philosophy. If this 
was true of Cato, these gentlemen copy after him in the 
manner of some persons who lived about his time,—pede 
nudo Catonem. Mr. Hume told me that he had from Rous- 
seau himself the secret of his principles of composition. 
That acute, though eccentric observer, had perceived, that, 
to strike and interest the public, the marvellous must be 
produced ; that the marvellous of the heathen mythology 
had long since lost its effects; that giants, magicians, fairies, 
and heroes of romance, which succeeded, had exhausted the 
portion of credulity which belonged to their age; that now 
nothing was left to a writer but that species of the marvel- 
lous, which might still be produced, and with as great an 
effect as ever, though in another way,—that is, the marvel- 
lous in life, in manners, in characters, and in extraordinary 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 529 


situations, giving rise to new and unlooked-for strokes in 
politics and morals. I believe, that, were Rousseau alive, 
and in one of his lucid intervals, he would be shocked at the 
practical frenzy of his scholars, who in their paradoxes are 
servile imitators, and even in their incredulity discover an 
implicit faith. 

Men who undertake considerable things, even in a regular 
way, ought to give us ground to presume ability. But the 
physician of the state, who, not satisfied with the cure of 
distempers, undertakes to regenerate constitutions, ought to 
show uncommon powers. Some very unusual appearances of 
wisdom ought to display themselves on the face of the de- 
signs of those who appeal to no practise and who copy after 
no model. Has any such been manifested? Ishall take a 
view (it shall for the subject be a very short one) of what the 
Assembly has done, with regard, first, to the constitution of 
the legislature; in the next place, to that of the executive 
power; then to that of the judicature; afterwards to the 
model of the army; and conclude with the system of finance: 
to see whether we can discover in any part of their schemes 
the portentous ability which may justify these bold under- 
takers in the superiority which they assume over mankind. 

It is in the model of the sovereign and presiding part of 
this new republic that we should expect their grand display. 
Here they were to prove their title to their proud demands. 
For the plan itself at large, and for the reasons on which it 
is grounded, I refer to the journals of the Assembly of the 
29th of September, 1789, and to the subsequent proceedings 
which have made any alterations in the plan. So far as in 
a matter somewhat confused I can see light, the system 
remains substantially as it has been originally framed. My 
few remarks will be such as regard its spirit, its tendency, 
and its fitness for framing a popular commonwealth, which 
they profess theirs to be, suited to the ends for which any 
commonwealth, and particularly such a commonwealth, is 
made. At the same time I mean to consider its consistency 
with itself and its own principles. 


34 


530 BURKE 


Old establishments are tried by their effects. Ifthe people 
are happy, united, wealthy, and powerful, we presume the 
rest. Weconclude that to be good from whence good is 
derived. In old establishments various correctives have 
been found for their aberrations from theory. Indeed, they 
are the results of various necessities and expediences. They 
are not often constructed after any theory: theories are 
rather drawn from them. In them we often see the end best 
obtained, where the means seem not perfectly reconcilable 
to what we may fancy was the original scheme. The means 
taught by experience may be better suited to political ends 
than those contrived in the original project. They again 
react upon the primitive constitution, and sometimes im- 
prove the design itself, from which they seem to have de- 
parted. I think all this might be curiously exemplified in 
the British Constitution. At worst, the errors and devia- 
tions of every kind in reckoning are found and computed, 
and the ship proceeds in her course. This is the case of old 
establishments; but in a new and merely theoretic system, 
it is expected that every contrivance shall appear, on the 
face of it, to answer its ends, especially where the projectors 
are no way embarrassed with an endeavour to accommodate 
the new building to an old one, either in the walls or on 
the foundations. 

The French builders, ees away as mere rubbish what- 
ever they found, and, like their ornamental gardeners, form- 
ing everything into an exact level, propose to rest the 
whole local and general legislature on three bases of three 
different kinds,—one geometrical, one arithmetical, and the 
third financial; the first of which they call the basis of terri- 
tory ; the second, the basis of population; and the third, 
the basis of contribution. For the accomplishment of the 
first of these purposes, they divide the area of their country 
into eighty-three pieces, regularly square, of eighteen leagues 
by eighteen. These large divisions are called Departments. 
These they portion, proceeding by square measurement, into 
seventeen hundred and twenty districts, called Communes. 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 531 


These again they subdivide, still proceeding by square 
measurement, into smaller districts, called Cantons, making 
in all 6,400. 

At first view this geometrical basis of theirs presents not 
much to admire or to blame. It calls for no great legisla- 
tive talents. Nothing more than an accurate land-surveyor, 
with his chain, sight, and theodolite, is requisite for such a 
plan as this. In the old divisions of the country, various 
accidents at times, and the ebb and flow of various proper- 
ties and jurisdictions, settled their bounds. These bounds 
were not made upon any fixed system, undoubtedly. They 
were subject to some inconveniences; but they were in- 
conveniences for which use had found remedies, and habit 
had supplied accommodation and patience. In this new 
pavement of square within square, and this organization and 
semi-organization, made on the system of Empedocles and 
Buffon, and not upon any politic principle, it is impossible 
that innumerable local inconveniences, to which men are not 
habituated, must not arise. But these I pass over, because 
it requires an accurate knowledge of the country, which I do 
not possess, to specify them. 

When these state surveyors came to take a view of their 
work of measurement, they soon found that in politics the 
most fallacious of all things was geometrical demonstration. 
They had then recourse to another basis (or rather buttress) 
to support the building, which tottered on that false founda- 
tion. It was evident that the goodness of the soil, the 
number of the people, their wealth, and the largeness of their 
contribution, made such infinite variations between square 
and square as to render mensuration a ridiculous standard 
of power in the commonwealth, and equality in geometry 
the most unequal of all measures in the distribution of men. 
However, they could not give it up,—but, dividing their 
political and civil representation into three parts, they allotted 
one of those parts to the square measurement, without a 
single fact or calculation to ascertain whether this territorial 
proportion of representation was fairly assigned, and ought 


& 


baa BURKE 


upon any principle really to be a third. Having, however, 
given to geometry this portion, (of a third for her dower,) 
out of compliment, I suppose, to that sublime science, they 
left the other two to be scuffled for between the other as 
population and contribution. 

When they came to provide for population, they were not 
able to proceed quite so smoothly as they had done in the 
field of their geometry. Here their arithmetic came to bear 
upon their juridical metaphysics. Had they stuck to their 
metaphysic principles, the arithmetical process would be 
simple indeed. Men, with them, are strictly equal, and are 
entitled to equal rights in their own government. Each 
head, on this system, would have its vote, and every man 
would vote directly for the person who was to represent him 
in the legislature. “But soft,—by regular degrees, not yet.” 
This metaphysic principle, to which law, custom, usage, 
policy, reason, were to yield, is to yield itself to their pleas- 
ure. There must be many degrees, and some stages, before 
the representative can come in contact with his constituent. 
Indeed, as we shall soon see, these two persons are to have 
no sort of communion with each other. First, the voters in 
the Canton, who compose what they call primary assemblies, 
are to have a qualification. What! a qualification on the 
indefeasible rights of men? Yes; but it shall be a very 
small qualification. Our injustice shall be very little oppres- 
sive: only the local valuation of three days’ labour paid to 
the public. Why, this is not much, I readily admit, for any- 
thing but the utter subversion of your equalizing principle. 
As aqualification it might as well be let alone; for it answers 
no one purpose for which qualifications are established, and, 
on your ideas, it excludes from a vote the man of all others 
whose natural equality stands the most in need of protection 
and defense: I mean the man who has nothing else but his 
natural equality to guard him. You order him to buy the 
right which you before told him Nature had given to him 
gratuitously at his birth, and of which no authority on earth 
could lawfully deprive him. With regard to the person who 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 533 


cannot come up to your market, a tyrannous aristocracy, 
as against him, is established at the very outset, by you who 
pretend to be its sworn foe. 

The gradation proceeds. These primary assemblies of 
the Canton elect deputies to the Commune,—one for every 
two hundred qualified inhabitants. Here is the first medium 
put between the primary elector and the representative 
legislator; and here a new turnpike is fixed for taxing the 
rights of men with a second qualification: for none can be 
elected into the Commune who does not pay the amount 
of ten days’ labour. Nor have we yet done. There is still 
to be another gradation.** These Communes, chosen by the 
Canton, choose to the Department ; and the deputies of the 
Department choose their deputies to the National Assembly. 
Here is a third barrier of a senseless qualification. Every 
deputy to the National Assembly must pay, in direct contri- 
bution, to the value of a mark of silver. Of all these quali- 
fying barriers we must think alike: that they are impotent 
to secure independence, strong only to destroy the rights of 
men. 

In all this process, which in its fundamental elements af- 
fects to consider only population, upon a principle of nat- 
ural right, there is a manifest attention to property,—which, 
however just and reasonable on other schemes, is on theirs 
perfectly unsupportable. 

When they come to their third basis, that of Contribution, 
we find that they have more completely lost sight of the 
rights of men. This last basis rests entirely on property. A 
principle totally different from the equality of men, and ut- 
terly irreconcilable to it, is thereby admitted : but no sooner 
is this principle admitted than (as usual) it issubverted ; and 
it is not subverted (as we shall presently see) to approximate 
the inequality of riches to the level of Nature. The addi- 
tional share in the third portion of representation (a portion 
reserved exclusively for the higher contribution) is made to 
regard the district only, and not the individuals in it who 
pay. It is easy to perceive, by the course of their reasonings, 


534 BURKE 


how much they were embarrassed by their contradictory 
ideas of the rights of men and the privileges of riches. The 
Committee of Constitution do as good as admit that they are 
wholly irreconcilable. “The relation with regard to the con- 
tributions is without doubt null, (say they,) when the ques- 
tion is on the balance of the political rights as between indi- 
vidual and individual ; without which personal equality would 
be destroyed, and an aristocracy of the rich would be estab- 
lished. But this inconvenience entirely disappears, when the 
proportional relation of the contribution is only considered 
in the great masses, and is solely between province and prov- 
ince ; it serves in that case only to form a just reciprocal 
proportion between the cities, without affecting the personal 
rights of the citizens.” 

Here the principle of contribution, as taken between man 
and man, is reprobated as null, and destructive to equality,— 
and as pernicious, too, because it leads to the establishment 
of an aristocracy of the rich. However, it must not be aban- 
doned. And the way of getting rid of the difficulty is to 
establish the inequality as between department and depart- 
ment, leaving all the individuals in each department upon an 
exact par. Observe, that this parity between individuals had 
been before destroyed, when the qualifications within the de- 
partments were settled ; nor does it seem a matter of great im- 
portance whether the equality of men be injured by masses 
or individually. An individual is not of the same impor- 
tance in a mass represented bya few as in a mass represented 
by many. It would be too much to tell a man jealous of 
his equality, that the elector has the same franchise who 
votes for three members as he who votes for ten. 

Now take it in the other point of view, and let us suppose 
their principle of representation according to contribution, 
that is according to riches, to be well imagined, and to beanec- 
essary basis for their republic. In this their third basis they 
assume that riches ought to be respected, and that justice 
and policy require that they should entitle men, in some 
mode or other, toa larger share in the administration of pub- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION = 535 


lic affairs ; it is now to be seen how the Assembly provides 
for the pre-eminence, or even for the security of the rich, by 
conferring, in virtue of their opulence, that larger measure of 
power to their district which is denied to them personally. 
I readily admit (indeed, I should lay it down asa fundamen- 
tal principle) that in a republican government, which has a 
democratic basis, the rich do require an additional security 
above what is necessary to them in monarchies. They are 
subject to envy, and through envy to oppression. On the 
present scheme it is impossible to divine what advantage 
they derive from the aristocratic preference upon which the 
unequal representation of the masses is founded. The rich 
cannot feel it, either asasupport to dignity or as security to 
fortune: for the aristocratic mass is generated from purely 
democratic principles; and the prevalence given to it in the 
general representation has no sort of reference to or connection 
with the persons upon account of whose property this superi- 
ority of the mass is established. If the contrivers of this 
scheme meant any sort of favour to the rich, in consequence 
of their contribution, they ought to have conferred the privi- 
lege either on the individual rich, or on some class formed of 
rich persons (as historians represent Servius Tullius to have 
done in the early constitution of Rome); because the contest 
between the rich and the poor is notastruggle between cor- 
poration and corporation, but a contest between men and 
men,—a competition, not between districts, but between 
descriptions. It would answer its purpose better, if the 
scheme were inverted: that the votes of the masses were 
rendered equal, and that the votes within each mass were 
proportioned to property. 

Let ussuppose one man in a district (it is an easy supposi- 
tion) to contribute as much as a hundred of his neighbours. 
Against these he has but one vote. If there were but one 
representative for the mass, his poor neighbours would out- 
vote him by an hundred to one for that single representative. 
Bad enough! But amends are to be made him. How? 
The district, in virtue of his wealth, is to choose, say ten mem- 


530 BURKE 


bers instead of one: that is to say, by paying avery large con- 
tribution he has the happiness of being outvoted, an hun- 
dred to one, by the poor, for ten representatives, instead of 
being outvoted exactly in the same proportion for a single 
member. In truth, instead of benefiting by this superior 
quantity of representation, the rich man is subjected to an 
additional hardship. Theincrease of representation within 
his province sets up nine persons more, and as many more 
than nine as there may be democratic candidates, to cabal 
and intrigue and to flatter the people at his expense and to 
his oppression. An interest is by this means held out to 
multitudes of the inferior sort, in obtaining a salary of eigh- 
teen livresa day, (to them a vast object,) besides the pleasure 
of a residence in Paris, and their share in the government of 
the kingdom. The more the objects of ambition are multi- 
plied and become democratic, just in that proportion the 
rich are endangered. 

Thus it must fare between the poor and the rich in the 
province deemed aristocratic, which in its internal relation is 
the very reverse of that character. In its external relation, 
that is, in its relation to the other provinces, I can not see 
how the unequal representation which is given to masses on 
account of wealth becomes the means of preserving the equi- 
poise and the tranquillity of the commonwealth. For, if it 
be one of the objects to secure the weak from being crushed 
by the strong, (as in all society undoubtedly it is,) how are 
the smaller and poorer of these masses to be saved from the 
tyranny of the more wealthy? Is it by adding to the wealthy 
further and more systematical means of oppressing them ? 
When we come toa balance of representation between cor- 
porate bodies, provincial interests, emulations, and jealousies 
are full as likely to arise among them as among individuals ; 
and their divisions are likely to produce a much hotter spirit 
of dissension, and something leading much more nearly to 
a war. 

I see that these aristocratic masses are made upon what is 
called the principle of direct contribution. Nothing can be 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 537 


a more unequal standard than this. The indirect contribu- 
tion, that which arises from duties on consumption, is in 
truth a better standard, and follows and discovers wealth 
more naturally than this of direct contribution. It is diffi- 
cult, indeed, to fix a standard of local preference on account 
of the one, or of the other, or of both, because some prov- 
inces may pay the more of either or of both on account of 
causes not intrinsic, but originating from those very districts 
over whom they have obtained a preference in consequence 
of their ostensible contribution. If the masses were inde- 
pendent, sovereign bodies, who were to provide for a federa- 
tive treasury by distinct contingents, and the revenue 
had not (as it has) many impositions running through the 
whole, which affect men individually, and not corporately, 
and which, by their nature, confound all territorial limits, 
something might be said for the basis of contribution as 
founded on masses. But, of all things, this representation, 
to be measured by contribution, isthe most difficult to settle 
upon principles of equity in a country which considers its 
districts as members of awhole. Fora great city, such as 
Bordeaux or Paris, appears to pay a vast body of duties, 
almost out of all assignable proportion to other places, and 
its mass is considered accordingly. But are these cities the 
true contributors in that proportion? No. The consumers 
of the commodities imported into Bordeaux, who are scat- 
tered through all France, pay the import duties of Bordeaux. 
The produce of the vintage in Guienne and Languedoc give 
to that city the means of its contribution growing out of an 
export commerce. The landholders who spend their estates 
in Paris, and are thereby the creators of that city, contribute 
for Paris from the provinces out of which their revenues 
arise. Very nearly the same arguments will apply to the rep- 
resentative share given on account of direct contribution: 
because the direct contribution must be assessed on wealth, 
real or presumed ; and that local wealth will itself arise from 
causes not local, and which therefore in equity ought not to 
produce a local preference. 


538 | BURKE 


It is very remarkable, that, in this fundamental regulation 
which settles the representation of the mass upon the direct 
contribution, they have not yet settled how that direct con- 
tribution shall be laid, and how apportioned. Perhaps there 
is some latent policy towards the continuance of the present 
Assembly in this strange procedure. However, until they 
do this, they can have no certain constitution. It must de- 
pend at last upon the system of taxation, and must vary with 
every variation in that system. As they have contrived 
matters, their taxation does not so much depend on their 
constitution as their constitution on their taxation. This 
must introduce great confusion among the masses; as the 
variable qualification for votes within the district must, if 
ever real contested elections take place, cause infinite internal 
controversies. 

To compare together the three bases, not on their political 
reason, but on the ideas on which the Assembly 
works, and to try its consistency with itself, we can not avoid 
observing that the principle which the committee call the 
basis of population does not begin to operate from the same 
point with the two other principles, called the bases of terri- 
tory and of contribution, which are both of an aristocratic 
nature. The consequence is, that, where all three begin to 
operate together, there is the most absurd inequality pro- 
duced by the operation of the former on the two latter prin- 
ciples. Every canton contains four square leagues, and is 
estimated to contain, on the average, 4,000 inhabitants, or 
680 voters in the primary assemblies, which vary in numbers 
with the population of the canton, and send one deputy to 
the commune for every 200 voters. Nine cantons make a 
commune. 

Now let us take a canton containing a seaport town of 
trade, or a great manufacturing town. Let us suppose the 
population of this canton to be 12,700 inhabitants, or 2,193 
voters, forming three primary assemblies, and sending ten 
deputies to the commune. 

Oppose to this one canton two others of the remaining 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 539 


eight in the same commune. These we may suppose to 
have their fair population, of 4,000 inhabitants, and 680 vo- 
ters each, or 8,000 inhabitants and 1,360 voters both to- 
gether. These will form only two primary assemblies, and 
send only six deputies to the commune. 

When the assembly of the commune comes to vote on the 
basis of territory, which principle is first admitted to operate 
in that assembly, the single canton, which has half the terri- 
tory of the other two, will have ten voices to six in the 
election of three deputies to the assembly of the department, 
chosen on the express ground of a representation of territory. 
This inequality, striking as it is, will be yet highly agegra- 
vated, if we suppose, as we fairly may, the several other 
cantons of the commune to fall proportionably short of the 
average population, as much as the principal canton exceeds 
he 

Now as to the basis of contribution, which also is a prin- 
ciple admitted first to operate in the assembly of the com- 
mune. Let us again take one canton, such as is stated above. 
If the whole of the direct contributions paid by a great trad- 
ing or manufacturing town be divided equally among the 
inhabitants, each individual will be found to pay much more 
than an individual living in the country according to the 
same average. The whole paid by the inhabitants of the 
former will be more than the whole paid by the inhabitants 
of the latter,—we may fairly assume one third more. Then 
the 12,700 inhabitants, or 2,193 voters of the canton, will 
pay as much as 19,050 inhabitants, or 3,289 voters of the 
other cantons, which are nearly the estimated proportion of 
inhabitants and voters of five other cantons. Nowthe 2,193 
voters will, as I before said, send only ten deputies to the 
assembly ; the 3,289 voters will send sixteen. Thus, for an 
equal share in the contribution of the whole commune, there 
will be a difference of sixteen voices to ten in voting for de- 
puties to be chosen on the principle of representing the 
general contribution of the whole commune. 

By the same mode of computation, we shall find 15,875 


540 BURKE 


inhabitants, or 2,741 voters of the other cantons, who pay 
one-sixth less to the contribution of the whole commune, 
will have three voices more than the 12,700 inhabitants, or 
2,193 voters of the one canton. 

Such is the fantastical and unjust inequality between mass 
and mass, in this curious repartition of the rights of representa- 
tion arising out of territory and contribution. The quali- 
fications which these confer are in truth negative qualifica- 
tions, that give a right in an inverse proportion to the 
possession of them. 

In this whole contrivance of the three bases, consider it in 
any light you please, I do not see a variety of objects recon- 
ciled in one consistent whole, but several contradictory 
principles reluctantly and irreconcilably brought and held 
together by your philosophers, like wild beasts shut up in a 
cage, to claw and bite each other to their mutual destruc- 
tion. 

I am afraid I have gone too far into their way of consider- 
ing the formation of a Constitution. They have much, but 
bad, metaphysics,—much, but bad, geometry,—much, but 
false, proportionate arithmetic; but if it were all as exact as 
metaphysics, geometry, and arithmetic ought to be, and if 
their schemes were perfectly consistent in all their parts, 
it would make only a more fair and sightly vision. It is re- 
markable, that, in a great arrangement of mankind, not one 
reference whatsoever is to be found to anything moral or 
anything politic.—nothing that relates to the concerns, the 
actions, the passions, the interests of men. ‘“‘ Hominem non 
sapiunt.” 

You see I only consider this Constitution as electoral, and 
leading by steps to the National Assembly. I do not enter 
into the internal government of the departments, and their 
genealogy through the communesand cantons. These local 
governments are, in the original plan, to be as nearly as pos- 
sible composed in the same manner and on the same principles 
with the elective assemblies. They are each of them bodies 
perfectly compact and rounded in themselves, 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 541 


You cannot but perceive in this scheme, that it has a direct 
and immediate tendency to sever France into a variety of 
republics, and to render them totally independent of each 
other, without any direct constitutional means of coherence, 
connection, or subordination, except what may be derived 
from their acquiescence in the determinations of the general 
congress of the ambassadors from each independent republic. 
Such in reality is the National Assembly ; and such govern- 
ments, I admit, do exist in the world, though in forms in- 
finitely more suitable to the local and habitual circumstances 
of their people. But such associations, rather than bodies 
politic, have generally been the effect of necessity, not 
choice; and I believe the present French power is the very 
first body of citizens who, having obtained full authority to 
do with their country what they pleased, have chosen to dis- 
sever it in this barbarous manner. 

It is impossible not to observe, that, in the spirit of this 
geometrical distribution and arithmetical arrangement, these 
pretended citizens treat France exactly like a country of con- 
quest. Acting as conquerors, they have imitated the policy 
of the harshest of that harsh race. The policy of such bar- 
barous victors, who contemn a subdued people, and insult 
their feelings, has ever been, as much as in them lay, to des- 
troy all vestiges of the ancient country, in religion, in polity, 
in laws, and in manners; to confound all territorial limits; 
to produce a general poverty; to put up their properties to 
auction; to crush their princes, nobles, and pontiffs; to lay 
low everything which had lifted its head above the level, or 
which could serve to combine or rally, in their distresses, the 
disbanded people, under the standard of old opinion. They 
have made France free in the manner in which those sincere 
friends to the rights of mankind, the Romans, freed Greece, 
Macedon, and other nations. They destroyed the bonds of 
their union, under colour of providing for the independence 
of each of their cities. 

When the members who compose these new bodies of 
cantons, communes, and departments, arrangements pur- 


542 BURKE 


posely produced through the medium of confusion, begin to 
act, they will find themselves in a great measure strangers 
to one another. The electors and elected throughout, es- 
pecially in the rural cantons, will be frequently without any 
civil habitudes or connections, or any of that natural dis- 
cipline which is the soul of atrue republic. Magistrates and 
collectors of revenue are now no longer acquainted with their 
districts, bishops with their dioceses, or curates with their 
parishes. These new colonies of the rights of men bear a 
strong resemblance to that sort of military colonies which 
Tacitus has observed upon in the declining policy of Rome. 
In better and wiser days (whatever course they took with 
foreign nations) they were careful to make the elements of a 
methodical subordination and settlement to be coeval, and 
even to lay the foundations of discipline in the military.” 
But when all the good arts had fallen into ruin, they pro- 
ceeded, as your Assembly does, upon the equality of men, 
and with as little judgment, and as little care for those things 
which make a republic tolerable or durable. But in this, as 
well as almost every instance, your new commonwealth is 
born and bred and fed in those corruptions which mark de- 
generated and worn-out republics. Your child comes into 
the world with the symptoms of death; the facies Hippo- 
cratica forms the character of its physiognomy and the prog- 
nostic of its fate. 

The legislators who framed the ancient republics knew that 
their business was too arduous to be accomplished with no 
better apparatus than the metaphysics of an undergraduate 
and the mathematics and arithmetic of anexciseman. They 
had to do with men, and they were obliged to study human 
nature. They had to do with citizens, and they were obliged 
to study the effects of those habits which are communicated 
by the circumstances of civil life. They were sensible that 
the operation of this second nature on the first produced a 
new combination,—and thence arose many diversities 
amongst men, according to their birth, their education, their 
professions, the periods of their lives, their residence in towns 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 543 


or in the country, their several ways of acquiring and of fix- 
ing property, and according to the quality of the property 
itself, all which rendered them, as it were, so many different 
species of animals. From hence they thought themselves 
obliged to dispose their citizens into such classes, and to place 
them in such situations in the state, as their peculiar habits 
might qualify them to fill, and to allot to them such appro- 
priated privileges as might secure to them what their specific 
occasions required, and which might furnish to each descrip- 
tion such force as might protect it in the conflict caused by 
the diversity of interests that must exist, and must contend, 
in all complex society: for the legislator would have been 
ashamed that the coarse husbandman should well know how 
to assort and to use his sheep, horses, and oxen, and should 
have enough of common sense not to abstract and equalize 
them all into animals, without providing for each kind an 
appropriate food, care, and employment,—whilst he, the 
economist, disposer, and shepherd of his own kindred, sub- 
liming himself into an airy metaphysician, was resolved to 
know nothing of his flocks but as men in general. It is for 
this reason that Montesquieu observed, very justly, that, in 
their classification of the citizens, the great legislators of an- 
tiquity made the greatest display of their powers, and even 
soared above themselves. It is here that your modern legis- 
lators have gone deep into the negative series, and sunk even 
below their own nothing. As the first sort of legislators at- 
tended to the different kinds of citizens, and combined them 
into one commonwealth, the others, the metaphysical and 
alchemistical legislators, have taken the directly contrary 
course. They have attempted to confound all sorts of citi- 
zens, as well as they could, into one homogeneous mass; 
and then they divided this their amalgama into a number of 
incoherent republics. They reduce men to loose counters, 
merely for the sake of simple telling, and not to figures, 
whose power is to arise from their place in the table. The 
elements of their own metaphysics might have taught them 
better lessons. The troll of their categorical table might 


544 BURKE 


have informed them that there was something else in the 
intellectual world besides substance and quantity. They 
might learn from the catechism of metaphysics that there 
were eight heads more,*’ in every complex deliberation, 
which they have never thought of ; though these, of all the 
ten, are the subject on which the skill of man can operate 
anything at all. 

So far from this able disposition of some of the old republi- 
can legislators, which follows with a solicitous accuracy the 
moral conditions and propensities of men, they have leveled 
and crushed together all the orders which they found, even 
under the coarse, unartificial arrangement of the monarchy, 
in which mode of government the classing of the citizens is 
not of so much importance as in arepublic. It is true, how- 
ever, that every such classification, if properly ordered, is 
good in all forms of government, and composes a strong 
barrier against the excesses of despotism, as well as it is the 
necessary means of giving effect and permanence to a 
republic. For want of something of this kind, ifthe present 
project of a republic should fail, all securities to a moderated 
freedom fail along with it, all the indirect restraints which 
mitigate despotism are removed; insomuch that, if mon- 
archy should ever again obtain an entire ascendency in 
France, under this or any other dynasty, it will probably be, 
if not voluntarily tempered, at setting out, by the wise and 
virtuous counsels of the prince, the most completely arbi- 
trary power that has ever appeared on earth. This is to 
play a most desperate game. 

The confusion which attends on all such proceedings they 
even declare to be one of their objects, and they hope to 
secure their Constitution by a terror of a return of those 
evils which attended their making it. “ By this,” say they, 
“its destruction will become difficult to authority, which 
cannot break it up without the entire disorganization of the 
whole state.’’ They presume, that, if this authority should 
‘ ever come to the same degree of power that they have 
acquired, it would make a more moderate and chastised use of 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 545 


it, and would piously tremble entirely to disorganize the state 
in the savage manner that they have done. They expect 
from the virtues of returning despotism the security which is 
to be enjoyed by the offspring of their popular vices. 

I wish, Sir, that you and my readers would give an atten- 
tive perusal to the work of M. de Calonne on this subject. 
It is, indeed, not only an eloquent, but an able and instruc- 
tive performance. I confine myself to what he says relative 
to the Constitution of the new state, and to the condition of 
the revenue. Asto the disputes of this minister with his 
rivals, I do not wish to pronounce upon them. As little do 
I mean to hazard any opinion concerning his ways and 
means, financial or political, for taking his country out of its 
present disgraceful and deplorable situation of servitude, 
anarchy, bankruptcy, and beggary. I cannot speculate quite 
so sanguinely as he does: but he is a Frenchman, and has a 
closer duty relative to those objects, and better means of 
judging of them, than I can have. I wish that the formal 
avowal which he refers to, made by one of the principal 
leaders in the Assembly, concerning the tendency of their 
scheme to bring France not only from a monarchy to a re- 
public, but from a republic to a mere confederacy, may be 
very particularly attended to. It adds new force to my ob- 
servations: and, indeed, M. de Calonne’s work supplies my 
deficiencies by many new and striking arguments on most 
of the subjects of this letter. 

It is this resolution to break their country into separate 
republics which has driven them into the greatest number of 
their difficulties and contradictions. If it were not for this, 
all the questions of exact equality, and these balances, never 
to be settled, of individual rights, population, and contribu- 
tion, would be wholly useless. The representation, though 
derived from parts, would be a duty which equally regarded 
the whole. Each deputy to the Assembly would be the 
representative of France, and of all its descriptions, of the 
many and of the few, of the rich and of the poor, of the 


great districts and of the small. All these districts would them. 
35 


ma | BURKE 


selves be subordinate to some standing authority, existing in- 
dependently of them,—an authority in which their representa- 
tion, and everything that belongs to it, originated, and to 
which it was pointed. This standing, unalterable, funda- 
mental government would make, and it is the only thing 
which could make, that territory truly and properly a whole. 
With us, when we elect popular representatives, we send 
them to a council in which each man individually is a subject, 
and submitted to a government complete in all its ordinary 
functions. With you the elective Assembly is the sovereign, 
and the sole sovereign ; all the members are therefore in- 
tegral parts of this sole sovereignty. But with us it is 
totally different. With us, the representative, separated 
from the other parts, can have no action and no existence. 
The government is the point of reference of the several 
members and districts of our representation. This is the 
center of our unity. This government of reference is a 
trustee for the whole, and not for the parts. So is the 
other branch of our public council: I mean the House of 
Lords. With us the King and the Lords are several and 
joint securities for the equality of each district, each prov- 
ince, each city. When did you hear in Great Britain of 
any province suffering from the inequality of its representa- 
tion ? what district from having no representation at all? 
Not only our monarchy and our peerage secure the equality 
on which our unity depends, but it is the spirit of the House 
of Commons itself. The very inequality of representation, 
which is so foolishly complained of, is perhaps the very thing 
which prevents us from thinking or acting as members for | 
districts. Cornwall elects as many members as all Scotland. 
But is Cornwall better taken care of than Scotland? Few 
trouble their heads about any of your bases, out of some 
giddy clubs. Most of those who wish for any change, upon 
any plausible grounds, desire it on different ideas. 

Your new Constitution is the very reverse of ours in its 
principle; and I am astonished how any persons could 
dream of holding out anything done in it as an example for 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 547 


Great Britain. With you there is little, or rather no, con- 
nection between the last representative and the first constit- 
uent. The member who goes to the National Assembly is 
not chosen by the people, nor accountable to them. There 
are three elections before he is chosen; two sets of magis- 
tracy intervene between him and the primary assembly, so 
as to render him, as I have said, an ambassador of a state, 
and not the representative of the people within a state. By 
this the whole spirit of the election is changed; nor can any 
corrective your Constitution-mongers have devised render 
him anything else than what he is. The very attempt to do 
it would inevitably introduce a confusion, if possible, more 
horrid than the present. There is no way to make a con- 
nection between the original constituent and the representa- 
tive, but by the circuitous means which may lead the can- 
didate to apply in the first instance to the primary electors, 
in order that by their authoritative instructions (and some- 
thing more perhaps) these primary electors may force the 
two succeeding bodies of electors to make a choice agreeable 
to their wishes. But this would plainly subvert the whole 
scheme. It would be to plunge them back into that tumult 
and confusion of popular election, which, by their inter- 
posed gradation of elections, they mean to avoid, and at 
length to risk the whole fortune of the state with those who 
have the least knowledge of it and the least interest in it. 
This is a perpetual dilemma, into which they are thrown by 
the vicious, weak, and contradictory principles they have 
chosen. Unless the people break up and level this grada- 
tion, it is plain that they do not at all substantially elect to 
the Assembly ; indeed, they elect as little in appearance as 
reality. 

What is it we all seek for in an election? To answer its 
real purposes, you must first possess the means of knowing 
the fitness of your man; and then you must retain some 
hold upon him by personal obligation or dependence. 
For what end are these primary electors complimented, or 
rather mocked, with a choice? They can never know any- 


548 BURKE 


thing of the qualities of him that is to serve them, nor has 
he any obligation whatsoever to them. Of all the powers 
unfit to be delegated by those who have any real means 
of judging, that most peculiarly unfit is what relates toa 
personal choice. In case of abuse, that body of primary 
electors never can call the representative to an account for 
his conduct. He is too far removed from them in the chain 
of representation. If he acts improperly at the end of his 
two years’ lease, it does not concern him for two years 
more. By the new French Constitution the best and the 
wisest representatives go equally with the worst into this 
Limbus Patrum. ‘Their bottoms are supposed foul, and they 
must go into dock to be refitted. Every man who has 
served in an Assembly is ineligible for two years after. Just 
as these magistrates begin to learn their trade, like chimney- 
sweepers, they are disqualified for exercising it. Superficial, 
new, petulant acquisition, and interrupted, dronish, broken, 
ill recollection, is to be the destined character of all your 
future governors. Your Constitution has too much of 
jealousy to have much of sense in it. You consider the 
breach of trust in the representative so principally that you 
do not at all regard the question of his fitness to execute it. 

This purgatory interval is not unfavourable to a faithless 
representative, who may be as good a canvasser as he was a 
bad governor. In this time he may cabal himself into a 
superiority over the wisest and most virtuous. As, in the 
end, all the members of this elective Constitution are equally 
fugitive, and exist only for the election, they may be no longer 
the same persons who had chosen him, to whom he is to be 
responsible when he solicits fora renewal of his trust. To 
call all the secondary electors of the commune to account 
is ridiculous, impracticable, and unjust: they may them- 
selves have been deceived in their choice, as the third set of 
electors, those of the department, may be intheirs. In your 
elections responsibility cannot exist. 

Finding no sort of principle of coherence with each other 
in the nature and constitution of the several new republics 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 549 


of France, I considered what cement the legislators had 
provided for them from any extraneous materials. Their 
confederations, their spectacles, their civic feasts, and their 
enthusiasm I take no notice of; they are nothing but mere 
tricks; but tracing their policy through their actions, I think 
I can distinguish the arrangements by which they propose 
to hold these republics together. The first is the confiscation, 
with the compulsory paper currency annexed to it; the 
second is the supreme power of the city of Paris; the third 
is the general army of the state. Of this last I shall reserve 
what I have to say, until I come to consider the army as an 
head by itself. 

As to the operation of the first (the confiscation and paper 
currency) merely as a cement, I can not deny that these, the 
one depending on the other, may for some time compose 
some sort of cement, if their madness and folly in the man- 
agement, and in the tempering of the parts together, does 
not produce a repulsion in the very outset. But allowing to 
the scheme some coherence and some duration, it appears to 
me, that, if after a while, the confiscation should not be 
found sufficient to support the paper coinage (as I am 
morally certain it will not), then, instead of cementing, it 
will add infinitely to the dissociation, distraction, and con- 
fusion of these confederate republics, both with relation to 
each other and to the several parts within themselves. But 
if the confiscation should so far succeed as to sink the paper 
currency, the cement is gone with the circulation. In the 
meantime its binding force will be very uncertain, and it will 
straiten or relax with every variation in the credit of the 
paper. 

One thing only is certain in this scheme, which is an effect 
seemingly collateral, but direct, 1] have no doubt, in the 
minds of those who conduct this business: that is, its effect 
in producing an oligarchy in every one of the republics. A 
paper circulation, not founded on any real money deposited 
or engaged for, amounting already to four-and-forty mill- 
ions of English money, and this currency by force substituted 


550 BURKE 


in the place of the coin of the kingdom, becoming thereby 
the substance of its revenue, as well as the medium of all its 
commercial and civil intercourse, must put the whole of 
what power, authority, and influence is left, in any form 
whatsoever it may assume, into the hands of the managers 
and conductors of this circulation. 

In England we feel the influence of the Bank, though it 
is only the center of a voluntary dealing. He knows little, 
indeed, of the influence of money upon mankind, who does 
not see the force of the management of a moneyed concern 
which is so much more extensive, and in its nature so much 
more depending on the managers, than any of ours. But 
this is not merely a money concern. There is another mem- 
ber in the system inseparably connected with this money 
management. It consists in the means of drawing out at 
discretion portions of the confiscated lands for sale, and 
carrying on a process of continual transmutation of paper 
into land and land into paper. When we follow this process 
in its effects, we may conceive something of the intensity of 
the force with which this system must operate. By this 
means the spirit of money-jobbing and speculation goes into 
the mass of land itself, and incorporates with it. By this 
kind of operation, that species of property becomes, as it 
were, volatilized ; it assumes an unnatural and monstrous 
activity, and thereby throws into the hands of the several 
managers, principal and subordinate, Parisian and provincial, 
all the representative of money, and perhaps a full tenth 
part of all the land in France, which has now acquired the 
worst and most pernicious part of the evil of a paper circula- 
tion, the greatest possible uncertainty in its value. They 
have reversed the Latonian kindness to the landed property 
of Delos. They have sent theirs to be blown about, like the 
light fragments of a wreck, oras et littora circum. 

The new dealers, being all habitually adventurers, and 
without any fixed habits or local predilections, will purchase 
to job out again, as the market of paper or of money or of 
land shall present an advantage. For though a holy bishop 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 551 


thinks that agriculture will derive great advantages from the 
“enlightened ’”’ usurers who are to purchase the Church con- 
fiscations, I who am not a good, but an old farmer, with 
great humility beg leave to tell his late Lordship that usury 
is not a tutor of agriculture ; and if the word “enlightened” 
be understood according to the new dictionary, as it always 
is in your new schools, I can not conceive how a man’s not 
believing in God can teach him to cultivate the earth with 
the least of any additional skill or encouragement. “ Diis 
immortalibus sero,” said an old Roman, when he held one 
handle of the plow, whilst Death held the other. Though 
you were to join in the commission all the directors of the 
two Academies to the directors of the Caisse d’Escompte, 
an old experienced peasant is worth them all. I have got 
more information upon a curious and interesting branch of 
husbandry, in one short conversation with an old Carthusian 
monk, than I have derived from all the bank directors that 
I have ever conversed with. However, there is no cause for 
apprehension from the meddling of money-dealers with rural 
economy. These gentlemen are too wise in their generation. 
At first, perhaps, their tender and susceptible imaginations 
may be captivated with the innocent and unprofitable 
delights of a pastoral life; but in a little time they will find 
that agriculture is a trade much more laborious and much 
less lucrative than that which they had left. After making 
its panegyric, they will turn their backs on it, like their great 
precursor and prototype. They may, like him, begin by 
singing, “ Beatus ille,’—but what will be the end? 


Hec ubi locutus foenerator Alphius, 
Jam jam futurus rusticus, 

Omnem relegit Idibus pecuniam, 
Querit Calendis ponere. 


They will cultivate the Caisse d’Eglise, under the sacred 
auspices of this prelate, with much more profit than its vine- 
yards and its corn-fields. They will employ their talents 
according to their habits and their interests. They will not 


552 BURKE 


follow the plow, whilst they can direct treasuries and govern 
provinces. 

Your legislators, in everything new, are the very first who 
have founded a commonwealth upon gaming, and infused 
this spirit into it as its vital breath. The great object in 
these politics is to metamorphose France from a great king- 
dom into one great play-table,—to turn its inhabitants into 
a nation of gamesters,—to make speculation as extensive as 
life,—to mix it with all its concerns,—and to divert the 
whole of the hopes and fears of the people from their usual 
channels into the impulses, passions, and superstitions of 
those who live on chances. They loudly proclaim their 
opinion, that this their present system of a republic can not 
possibly exist without this kind of gaming fund, and that 
the very thread of its life is spun out of the staple of these 
speculations. The old gaming in funds was mischievous 
enough, undoubtedly; but it was so only to individuals. 
Even when it had its greatest extent, in the Mississippi and 
South Sea, it affected but few, comparatively ; where it 
extends further, as in lotteries, the spirit has but a single 
object. But where the law, which in most circumstances 
forbids, and in none countenances gaming, is itself debauched, 
so as to reverse its nature and policy, and expressly to force 
the subject to this destructive table, by bringing the spirit 
and symbols of gaming into the minutest matters, and 
- engaging everybody in it, and in everything, a more dreadful 
epidemic distemper of that kind is spread than yet has ap. 
peared in the world. With you a man can neither earn nor 
buy his dinner without a speculation. What he receives in 
the morning will not have the same value at night. What 
he is compelled to take as pay for an old debt will not be 
received as the same, when he comes to pay a debt contracted 
by himself; nor will it be the same, when by prompt pay- 
ment he would avoid contracting any debt at all. Industry 
must wither away. Economy must be driven from your 
country. Careful provision will have no existence. Who 
will labour without knowing the amount of his pay? Who 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 553 


will study to increase what none can estimate? Who will 
accumulate, when he does not know the value of what he 
saves? If you abstract it from its uses in gaming, to accu- 
mulate, your paper wealth would be, not the providence of 
a man, but the distempered instinct of a jackdaw. 

The truly melancholy part of the policy of systematically 
making a nation of gamesters is this,—that, though all are 
forced to play, few can understand the game, and fewer still 
are in a condition to avail themselves of that knowledge. 
The many must be the dupes of the few who conduct the 
machine of these speculations. What effect it must have on 
the country-people is visible. The townsman can calcu- 
late from day to day ; not so the inhabitant of the country. 
When the peasant first brings his corn to market, the magis- 
trate in the towns obliges him to take the assignat at par ; 
when he goes to the shop with this money, he finds it seven 
per cent. the worse for crossing the way. This market he 
will not readily resort to again. The towns-people will be 
inflamed ; they will force the country-people to bring their 
corn. Resistance will begin, and the murders of Paris and 
St. Denis may be renewed through all France. 

What signifies the empty compliment paid to the country, 
by giving it, perhaps, more than its share in the theory of 
your representation ? Where have you placed the real power 
over moneyed and landed circulation? Where have you plac- 
ed the means of raising and falling the value of every man’s 
freehold? Those whose operations can take from or add 
ten per cent. to the possessions of every man in France must 
be the masters of every man in France. The whole of the 
power obtained by this Revolution will settle in the towns 
among the burghers, and the moneyed directors who lead 
them. The landed gentleman, the yeoman, and the peasant 
have, none of them, habits or inclinations or experience 
which can lead them to any share in this the sole source of 
power and influence nowleft in France. The very nature of 
a country life, the very nature of landed property, in all the 
occupations and all the pleasures they afford, render com- 


BoA BURKE 


bination and arrangement (the sole way of procuring and ex- 
erting influence) in a manner impossible amongst country- 
people. Combine them by all the art you can, and all the 
industry, they are always dissolving into individuality. Any- 
thing in the nature of incorporation is almost impracticable 
amongst them. Hope, fear, alarm, jealousy, the ephemerous 
tale that does its business and dies in a day, all these things, 
which are the reins and spurs by which leaders check or urge 
the minds of followers, are not easily employed,or hardly at all, 
amongst scattered people. They assemble, they arm, they act, 
with the utmost difficulty, and atthe greatest charge. Their 
efforts, ifever they can be commenced, can not be sustained. 
They can not proceed systematically. If the country-gentle- 
men attempt an influence through the mere income of their 
property, what is it to that of those who have ten times their 
income to sell, and who can ruin their property by bringing 
their plunder to meet it at market? Ifthe landed man wishes 
to mortgage, he falls the value of his land and raises the value 
of assignats. He augments the power of his enemy by the 
very means he must take to contend with him. The country- 
gentleman, therefore, the officer by sea and land, the man of 
liberal views and habits, attached to no profession, will be as 
completely excluded from the government of his country as 
if he were legislatively proscribed. It is obvious that, in the 
towns, all the things which conspire against the country-gen- 
tleman combine in favour of the money manager and director. 
In towns combination is natural. The habits of burghers, 
their occupations, their diversion, their business, their idle- 
ness, continually bring them into mutual contact. Their 
virtues and their vices are sociable ; they are always in gar- 
rison ; and they come embodied and half-disciplined into the 
hands of those who mean to form them for civil or military 
action. 

All these considerations leave no doubt on my mind, that, © 
if this monster of a Constitution can continue, France will 
be wholly governed by the agitators in corporations, by so- 
cieties in the towns, formed of directors in assignats, and 


rath 
are! 
be sy 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 555 


trustees for the sale of Church lands, attorneys, agents, 
money-jobbers, speculators, and adventurers, composing an 
ignoble oligarchy, founded on the destruction of the crown, 
the Church, the nobility, and the people. Here end all the 
deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of 
men. In “the Serbonian bog’”’ of this base oligarchy they 
are all absorbed, sunk, and lost forever. 

Though human eyes can not trace them, one would be 
tempted to think some great offenses in France must cry to 
Heaven, which has thought fit to punish it with a subjection 
to a vile and inglorious domination, in which no comfort or 
compensation is to be found in any even of those false splen- 
dours which, playing about other tyrannies, prevent mankind 
from feeling themselves dishonoured even whilst they are op- 
pressed. I must confess I am touched with a sorrow mixed 
with some indignation, at the conduct ofa few men, once of 
great rank, and still of great character, who, deluded with 
specious names, have engaged in a business too deep for the 
line of their understanding to fathom,—who have lent their 
fair reputation and the authority of their high-sounding 
names to the designs of men with whom they could not be 
acquainted, and have thereby made their very virtues operate 
to the ruin of their country. 

So far as to the first cementing principle. 

The second material of cement for their new republic is 
the superiority of the city of Paris; and this, I admit, is 
strongly connected with the other cementing principle of 
paper circulation and confiscation. It isin this part of the 
project we must look for the cause of the destruction of all the 
old bounds of provinces and jurisdictions, ecclesiastical and 
secular, and the dissolution of all ancient combinations of 
things, as well as the formation of so many small unconnected 
republics. The power of the city of Paris is evidently one 
great spring of all their politics. It is through the power of 
Paris, now become the center and focus of jobbing, that 
the leaders of this faction direct, or rather command, the 
whole legislative and the whole executive government. 


556 BURKE 


Everything, therefore, must be done which can confirm the 
authority of that city over the other republics. Paris is com- 
pact ; she has an enormous strength, wholly disproportioned 
to the force of any of the square republics; and this strength 
is collected and condensed within a narrow compass. Paris 
has a natural and easy connection of its parts, which will not 
be affected by any scheme of a geometrical constitution ; 
nor does it much signify whether its proportion of represen- 
tation be more or less, since it has the whole draught of 
fishes in its drag-net. The: other divisions of the kingdom, 
being hackled and torn to pieces, and separated from all their 
habitual means and even principles of union, cannot, for 
some time at least, confederate against her. Nothing was 
to be left in all the subordinate members, but weakness, dis- 
connection, and confusion. ‘To confirm this part of the plan, 
the Assembly has lately come to a resolution that no two of 
their republics shall have the same commander-in-chief. 

To a person who takes a view of the whole, the strength 
of Paris, thus formed, will appear a system of general weak- 
ness. It is boasted that the geometrical policy has been 
adopted, that all local ideas should be sunk, and that the 
people should be no longer Gascons, Picards, Bretons, Nor- 
mans,—but Frenchmen, with one country, one heart, and one 
Assembly. But, instead of being all Frenchmen, the greater 
likelihood is that the inhabitants of that region will shortly 
have no country. No man ever was attached by a sense of 
pride, partiality, or real affection, to a description of square 
measurement. He never will glory in belonging to the 
chequer No. 71, or to any other badge-ticket. We begin our 
public affections in our families. Nocold relation is a zeal- 
ous citizen. We pass on to our neighbourhoods, and our 
habitual provincial connections. These are inns and resting- 
places. Such divisions of our country as have been formed 
by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority, were so 
many little images of the great country, in which the heart 
found something which it could fill, The love to the whole 
is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality. Perhaps 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 557 


it is a sort of elemental training to those higher and more 
large regards by which alone men come to be affected, as 
with their own concern, in the prosperity of a kingdom so 
extensive as that of France. In that general territory itself, 
as in the old name of Provinces, the citizens are interested 
from old prejudices and unreasoned habits, and not on ac- 
count of the geometric properties of its figure. The power 
and preeminence of Paris does certainly press down and 
hold these republics together as long as it lasts: but, for the 
reasons I have already given you, I think it can not last 
very long. 

Passing from the civil creating and the civil cementing 
principles of this Constitution to the National Assembly, 
which is to appear and act as sovereign, we see a body in its 
constitution with every possible power and no possible ex- 
ternal control. We see a body without fundamental laws, 
without established maxims, without respected rules of pro- 
ceeding, which nothing can keep firm to any system what- 
soever. Their idea of their powers is always taken at the 
utmost stretch of legislative competency, and their ex- 
amples for common cases from the exceptions of the most 
urgent necessity. The future is to be in most respects like 
the present Assembly ; but, by the mode of the new elections 
and the tendency of the new circulations, it will be purged 
of the small degree of internal control existing ina minority 
chosen originally from various interests, and preserving 
something of their spirit. If possible, the next Assembly 
must be worse than the present. The present, by destroying 
and altering everything, will leave to their successors appar- 
ently nothing popular to do. They will be roused by emu- 
lation and example to enterprises the boldest and the most 
absurd. To suppose such an Assembly sitting in perfect 
quietude is ridiculous. 

Your all-sufficient legislators, in their hurry to do every- 
thing at once, have forgot one thing that seems essential, 
and which, I believe, never has been before, in the theory or 
the practise, omitted by any projector of a republic. They 


558 BURKE 


have forgot to constitute a senate, or something of that nature 
and character. Never, before this time, was heard of a body 
politic composed of one legislative and active assembly, and 
its executive officers, without such a council: without some- 
thing to which foreign states might connect themselves,— 
something to which, in the ordinary detail of government, 
the people could look up,—something which might give a 
bias and steadiness, and preserve something like consistency 
in the proceedings of state. Such a body kings generally 
have as a council. A monarchy may exist without it; but 
it seems to be in the very essence of a republican govern- 
ment. It holds a sort of middle place between the supreme 
power exercised by the people, or immediately delegated 
from them, and the mere executive. Of this there are no 
traces in your Constitution ; and in providing nothing of this 
kind, your Solons and Numas have, as much as in anything 
else, discovered a sovereign incapacity. 

Let us now turn our eyes to what they have done towards 
the formation of an executive power. For this they have 
chosen a degraded king. This their first executive officer is 
to be a machine, without any sort of deliberative discretion 
in any one act of his function. At best, he is but a channel 
to convey to the National Assembly such matter as may im- 
port that body to know. If he had been made the exclusive 
channel, the power would not have been without its impor- 
tance, though infinitely perilous to those who would choose 
to exercise it. But public intelligence and statement of facts 
may pass to the Assembly with equal authenticity through 
any other conveyance. As tothe means, therefore, of giving 
a direction to measures by the statement of an authorized 
reporter, this office of intelligence is as nothing. 

To consider the French scheme of an executive officer, in 
its two natural divisions of civil and political—In the first 
it must be observed, that, according to the new Constitution, 
the higher parts of judicature, in either of its lines, are not 
inthe king. The king of France is not the fountain of 
justice. The judges, neither the original nor the appellate, 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 559 


are of his nomination. He neither proposes the candidates 
nor has a negative on the choice. He is not even the public 
prosecutor. He serves only as a notary, to authenticate the 
choice made of the judges in the several districts. By his 
officers he is to execute their sentence. When we look into 
the true nature of his authority, he appears to be nothing 
more than a chief of bumbailiffs, sergeants-at-mace, catch- 
poles, jailers, and hangmen. It is impossible to place any- 
thing called royalty in a more degrading point of view. A 
thousand times better it had been for the dignity of this un. 
happy prince, that he had nothing at all to do with the 
administration of justice, deprived as he is of all that is ven- 
erable and all that is consolatory in that function, without 
power of originating any process, without a power of sus- 
pension, mitigation, or pardon. Everything in justice that 
is vile and odious is thrown upon him. It was not for noth- 
ing that the Assembly has been at such pains to remove the 
stigma from certain offices, when they were resolved to place 
the person who had lately been their king in a situation but 
one degree above the executioner, and in an office nearly of 
the same quality. Itis not in Nature, that, situated as the 
king of the French now is, he can respect himself or can be 
respected by others. 

View this new executive officer on the side of his political 
capacity, as he acts under the orders of the National Assem- 
bly. To execute laws is a royal office; to execute orders is 
notto bea king. However, a political executive magistracy, 
though merely such, isa great trust. It is a trust, indeed, 
that has much depending upon its faithful and diligent per- 
formance, both in the person presiding in it and in all its 
subordinates. Means of performing this duty ought to be 
given by regulation; and dispositions towards it ought to 
be infused by the circumstances attendant on the trust. It 
ought to be environed with dignity, authority, and considera- 
tion, and it ought to lead to glory. The office of execution 
is an office of exertion. It isnot from impotence we are to 
expect the tasks of power. What sort of person is a king to 


« 


560 BURKE 


command executory service, who has no means whatsoever to 
reward it:—not in a permanent office; not in a grant of 
land; no, not in a pension of fifty pounds a year; not in the 
vainest and most trivial title? In France the king is no more 
the fountain of honour than he is the fountain of justice. 
All rewards, all distinctions, arein other hands. Those who 
serve the king can be actuated by no natural motive but 
fear,—by a fear of everything except their master. His 
functions of internal coercion are as odious as those which 
he exercises in the department of justice. If relief is to be 
given to any municipality, the Assembly gives it. If troops 
are to be sent to reduce them to obedience to the Assembly, 
the king is to execute the order; and upon every occasion 
he is to be spattered over with the blood of his people. He 
has no negative; yet his name and authority is used to en- 
force every harsh decree. Nay, he must concur in the but- 
chery of those who shall attempt to free him from his im- 
prisonment, or show thé slightest attachment to his person 
or to his ancient authority. 

Executive magistracy ought to be constituted in sucha 
manner that those who compose it should be disposed to 
love and to venerate those whom they are bound to obey. 
A purposed neglect, or, what is worse, a literal, but perverse 
and malignant obedience, must be the ruin of the wisest 
counsels. In vain will the law attempt to anticipate or to fol- 
low such studied neglects and fraudulent attentions. Tomake 
them act zealously is not in the competence of law. Kings, 
even such as are truly kings, may and ought to bear the 
freedom of subjects that are obnoxious to them. They may 
too, without derogating from themselves, bear even the 
authority of such persons, if it promotes their service. Louis 
the Thirteenth mortally hated the Cardinal de Richelieu ; but 
his support of that minister against his rivals was the source 
of all the glory of his reign, and the solid foundation of his 
throne itself. Louis the Fourteenth, when come to the 
throne, did not love the Cardinal Mazarin; but for his in- 
terests he preserved him in power. When old, he detested 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 561 


Louvois ; but for years, whilst he faithfully served his great- 
ness, he endured his person. When George the Second took 
Mr. Pitt, who certainly was not agreeable to him, into his 
councils, he did nothing which could humble a wise sove- 
reign. But these ministers, who were chosen by affairs, not 
by affections, acted in the name of and in trust for kings, 
and not as their avowed constitutional and ostensible mas- 
ters. I think it impossible that any king, when he has re- 
covered his first terrors, can cordially infuse vivacity and 
vigour into measures which he knows to be dictated by those 
who, he must be persuaded, are in the highest degree ill 
affected to his person. Will any ministers, who serve such 
a king (or whatever he may be called) with but a decent ap- 
pearance of respect, cordially obey the orders of those whom 
but the other day in his name they had committed to the 
Bastile? will they obey the orders of those whom, whilst 
they were exercising despotic justice upon them, they con- 
ceived they were treating with lenity, and for whom in a 
prison they thought they had provided an asylum? If you 
expect such obedience, amongst your other innovations and 
regenerations, you ought to make a revolution in Nature, 
and provide a new constitution for the human mind: other- 
wise your supreme government cannot harmonize with its 
executory system. There are cases in which we can not take 
up with names and abstractions. You may call half a dozen 
leading individuals, whom we have reason to fear and hate, 
the nation. It makes no other difference than to make us 
fear and hate them the more. If it had been thought justi- 
fiable and expedient to make such a revolution by such 
means and through such persons as you have made yours, it 
would have been more wise to have completed the business 
of the fifth and sixth of October. Thenew executive officer 
would then owe his situation to those who are his creators as 
well as his masters; and he might be bound in interest, in 
the society of crime, and (if in crimes there could be virtues) 
in gratitude, to serve those who had promoted him toa place 
of ene lucre and great sensual indulgence,—and of some- 
3 


562 BURKE 


thing more: for more he must have received from those who 
certainly would not have limited an aggrandized creature as 
they have done a submitting antagonist. 

A king circumstanced asthe present, if he is totally stupe- 
fied by his misfortunes, so as to think it not the necessity, 
but the premium and privilege of life, to eat and sleep, with- 
out any regard to glory, can never be fit for the office. 
If he feels as men commonly feel, he must be sensible that 
an office so circumstanced is one in which he can obtain no 
fame or reputation. He has no generous interest that can 
excite him to action. At best, his conduct will be passive 
and defensive. To inferior people such an office might be 
matter of honour. But to be raised to it and to descend to it 
are different things, and suggest different sentiments. Does 
he really name the ministers? They will have a sympathy 
with him. Arethey forced upon him? The whole business 
between them and the nominal king will be mutual counter- 
action. In all other countries the office of ministers of state 
is of the highest dignity. In France it is full of peril, and 
incapable of glory. Rivals, however, they will have in their 
nothingness, whilst shallow ambition exists in the world, or 
the desire of a miserable salary is an incentive to shortsighted 
avarice. Those competitors of the ministers are enabled by 
your Constitution to attack them in their vital parts, whilst 
they have not the means of repelling their charges in any 
other than the degrading character of culprits. The minis- 
ters of state in France are the only persons in that country 
who are incapable of ashare in the national councils. What 
ministers! What councils! What a nation!—But they are 
responsible. It is a poor service that is to be had from re- 
sponsibility. The elevation of mind to be derived from fear 
will never make a nation glorious. Responsibility prevents 
crimes. It makes all attempts against the laws dangerous. 
But for a principle of active and zealous service, none but 
idiots could think of it. Is the conduct of a war to be trusted 
to aman who may abhor its principle,—who, in every step 
he may take to render it successful, confirms the power of 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 563 


those by whom he is oppressed? Will foreign states seri- 
ously treat with him who has no prerogative of peace or 
war,—no, not so much as ina single vote by himself or his 
ministers, or by any one whom he can possibly influence ? 
A state of contempt is not a state fora prince: better get 
rid of him at once. 

I know it will be said that these humours in the court and 
executive government will continue only through this 
generation, and that the king has been brought to declare 
the dauphin shall be educated in a conformity to his situa- 
tion. If he is madeto conform to his situation, he will have 
no education at all. His training must be worse even than 
that of an arbitrary monarch. If he reads,—whether he 
reads or not, some good or evil genius will tell him his an- 
cestors were kings. Thenceforward his object must be to 
assert himself and toavenge his parents. This you will say 
is not his duty. That may be; but it is Nature; and 
whilst you pique Nature against you, you do unwisely to trust 
toduty. In this futilescheme of polity, the state nurses in its 
bosom, for the present, a source of weakness, perplexity, 
counteraction, inefficiency, and decay ; and it prepares the 
means of its final ruin. In short, I see nothing in the 
executive force (I can not call it authority) that has even an 
appearance of vigour, or that has the smallest degree of just 
correspondence or symmetry or amicable relation with the 
supreme power, either as it now exists, or as it is planned for 
the future government. 

You have settled, by an economy as perverted as the 
policy, two * establishments of government,—one real, one 
fictitious: both maintained at a vast expense; but the 
fictitious at, I think, the greatest. Such a machine as the 
latter is not worth the grease of its wheels. The expense is 
exorbitant ; and neither the show nor the use deserve the 
tenth part of the charge.—Oh! but I don’t do justice to the 
talents of the legislators: I don’t allow, as I ought to do, for 
necessity. Their scheme of executive force was not their 
choice. This pageant must be kept. The people would 


564 BURKE 


not consent to part with it.—Right: Iunderstand you. You 
do, in spite of your grand theories, to which you would 
have heaven and earth to bend, you do know how to conform 
yourselves to the nature and circumstances of things. But 
when you were obliged to conform thus far to circumstances, 
you ought to have carried your submission farther, and to 
have made, what you were obliged to take, a proper instru- 
ment, and useful to its end. That was in your power. For 
instance, among many others, it was in your power to leave 
to your king the right of peaceand war.—What ! to leave to . 
the executive magistrate the most dangerous of all preroga- 
tives r—-I know none more dangerous ; nor any one more 
necessary to be so trusted. I do not say that this preroga- 
tive ought to be trusted to your king, unless he enjoyed other 
auxiliary trusts along with it, which he does not now hold. 
But, if he did possess them, hazardous as they are undoubt- 
edly, advantages would arise from such a Constitution, more 
than compensating the risk. There is no other way of keep- 
ing the several potentates of Europe from intriguing dis- 
tinctly and personally with the members of your Assembly, 
from intermeddling in all your concerns, and fomenting, in 
the heart of your country, the most pernicious of all factions, 
—factions in the interest and under the direction of foreign 
powers. From that worst of evils, thank God, we are still 
free. Yourskill, if you had any, would be well employed to 
find out indirect correctives and controls upon this perilous, 
trust. If you did not like those whichin England we have 
chosen, your leaders might have exerted their abilities in 
contriving better. If it were necessary to exemplify the 
consequences of such an executive government as yours, 
in the management of great affairs, ] should refer you to 
the late reports of M. de Montmorin to the National 
Assembly, and all the other proceedings relative to the 
differences between Great Britain and Spain. It would be 
treating your understanding with disrespect to point them 
out to you. 

I hear that the persons who are called ministers have sig- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 565 


nified an intention of resigning their places. I am rather as- 
tonished that they have not resigned long since. For the 
universe I would not have stood in the situation in which 
they have been for this last twelvemonth. They wished 
well, I take it for granted, to the Revolution. Let this fact 
be as it may, they could not, placed as they were upon an 
eminence, though an eminence of humiliation, but be the 
first to see collectively, and to feel each in his own depart- 
ment, the evils which have been produced by that Revolution. 
In every step which they took, or forbore to take, they must 
have felt the degraded situation of their country, and their 
utter incapacity of serving it. They are in a species of sub- 
ordinate servitude in which no men before them were ever 
seen. Without confidence from their sovereign on whom 
they were forced, or from the Assembly who forced them upon 


him, all the noble functions of their office are executed by » 


committees of the Assembly, without any regard whatsoever 


J 


to their personal or their official authority. They are to . 


execute, without power; they are to be responsible, with- 


out discretion; they are to deliberate, without choice. In . 


their puzzled situation, under two sovereigns, over neither of 
whom they have any influence, they must act in such a man- 
ner as(in effect, whatever they may intend) sometimes to be- 
tray the one, sometimes the other, and always to betray 
themselves. Such has been their situation ; such must be 
the situation of those who succeed them. I have much 
respect, and many good wishes, for M. Necker. I am 
obliged to him for attentions. I thought, when his enemies 
had driven him from Versailles, that his exile was a subject 
of most serious congratulation. “Sed multe urbes et publica 
vota vicerunt.” He is now sitting on the ruins of the fi- 
nances and of the monarchy of France. 

A great deal more might be observed on the strange con- 
stitution of the executory part of the new government; but 
fatigue must give bounds to the discussion of subjects which 
in themselves have hardly any limits. 

As little genius and talent am I able to perceive in the 


566 BURKE 


plan of judicature formed by the National Assembly. Ac- 
cording to their invariable course, the framers of your Con- 
stitution have begun with the utter abolition of the parlia- 
ments. These venerable bodies, like the rest of the old 
government, stood in need of reform, even though there 
should be no change madeinthe monarchy. ‘They required 
several more alterations to adapt them to the system ofa 
free Constitution. But they had particulars in their consti- 
tution, and those nota few, which deserved approbation from 
the wise. They possessed one fundamental excellence: they 
were independent. The most doubtful circumstance attend- 
ant on their office, that of its being vendible, contributed, 
however, to this independency of character. They held for 
life. Indeed, they may be said to have held by inheritance. 
Appointed by the monarch, they were considered as nearly 
out of his power. The most determined exertions of that 
authority against them only showed their radical independ- 
ence. They composed permanent bodies politic, constituted 
to resist arbitrary innovation; and from that corporate con- 
stitution, and from most of their forms, they were well calcu- 
lated to afford both certainty and stability tothelaws. They 
had been a safe asylum to secure these laws, in all the revolu- 
tions of humour and opinion. They had saved that sacred 
deposit of the country during the reigns of arbitrary princes 
and the struggles of arbitrary factions. They keptalive the 
memory and record of the Constitution. They were the 
great security to private property; which might be said 
(when personal liberty had no existence) to be, in fact, as 
well guarded in France as in any other country. Whatever 
is supreme in a state ought to have, as much as possible, its 
judicial authority so constituted as not only not to depend 
upon it, but in some sort to balance it. It ought to givea 
security to its justice against its power. It ought to make 
its judicature, as it were, something exterior to the state. 
These parliaments had furnished, not the best certainly, 
but some considerable corrective to the excesses and vices 
of the monarchy. Such an independent judicature was ten 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 567 


times more necessary when ademocracy became the absolute 
power of the country. In that Constitution, elective, tempo- 
rary, local judges, such as you have contrived, exercising 
their dependent functions in a narrow society, must be the 
worst of all tribunals. In them it will be vain to look for 
any appearance of justice towards strangers, towards the ob- 
noxious rich, towards the minority of routed parties, towards 
all those who in the election have supported unsuccessful 
candidates. It will be impossible to keep the new tribunals 
clear of the worst spirit of faction. All contrivances by bal- 
lot we know experimentally to be vain and childish to pre- 
vent a discovery of inclinations. Where they may the best 
answer the purposes of concealment, they answer to produce 
suspicion, and this is a still more mischievous cause of par- 
tiality. 

If the parliaments had been preserved, instead of being 
dissolved at so ruinous a change to the nation, they might 
have served in this new commonwealth, perhaps not precisely 
the same, (I donot mean an exact parallel,) but near the same 
purposes as the court and senate of Areopagus did in Athens: 
that is, as one of the balances and correctives to the evils of 
a light and unjust democracy. Every one knows that this 
tribunal was the great stay of that state; every one knows 
with what care it was upheld, and with what a religious awe 
it was consecrated. The parliaments were not wholly free 
from faction, I admit; but this evil was exterior and ac- 
cidental, and not so much the vice of their constitution itself 
as it must be in your new contrivance of sexennial elective 
judicatories. Several English commend the abolition of the 
old tribunals, as supposing that they determined everything 
by bribery and corruption. But they have stood the test of 
monarchic and republican scrutiny. The court was well dis- 
posed to prove corruption on those bodies, when they were 
dissolved in 1771; those who have again dissolved them 
would have done the same, if they could; but both inquisi- 
tions having failed, I conclude that gross pecuniary corrup- 

tion must have been rather rare amongst them. 


568 BURKE 


It would have been prudent, along with the parliaments, 
to preserve their ancient power of registering, and of remon- 
strating at least upon, all the decrees of the National As- 
sembly, as they did upon those which passed in the time of 
the monarchy. It would be a means of squaring the occa- 
sional decrees of a democracy to some principles of general 
jurisprudence. The vice of the ancient democracies, and one 
cause of their ruin, was, that they ruled, as you do, by oc- 
casional decrees, psephismata. This practice soon broke in 
upon the tenor and consistency of the laws; it abated the 
respect of the people towards them, and totally destroyed 
them in the end. 

Your vesting the power of remonstrance, which, in the 
time of the monarchy, existed in the Parliament of Paris, in 
your principal executive officer, whom, in spite of common 
sense, you persevere in calling king, is the height of absurdity. 
You ought never to suffer remonstrance from him who is to 
_execute. This is to understand neither council nor execu- 
tion, neither authority nor obedience. The person whom 
you call king ought not to have this power, or he ought to 
have more. 

Your present arrangement is strictly judicial. Instead of 
imitating your monarchy, and seating your judges on a bench 
of independence, your object is to reduce them to the most 
blind obedience. As you have changed all things, you have 
invented new principles of order. You first appoint judges, 
who, I suppose, are to determine according to law, and then 
you let them know, that, at some time or other, you intend 
to give them some law by which they are to determine. Any 
studies which they have made (if any they have made) are to 
be useless to them. But to supply these studies, they are 
to be sworn to obey all the rules, orders, and instructions 
which from time to time they are to receive from the Na- 
tional Assembly. These if they submit to, they leave no 
ground of law to the subject. They become complete and 
most dangerous instruments in the hands of the governing 
power, which, in the midst of a cause, or on the prospect of 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 569 


it, may wholly change the rule of decision. If these orders 
of the National Assembly come to be contrary to the will of 
the people who locally choose those judges, such confusion 
must happen as is terrible to think of. For the judges owe 
their place to the local authority, and the commands they 
are sworn to obey come from those who have no share in 
their appointment. Inthe mean time they have the example 
of the court of Chatelet to encourage and guide them in the 
exercise of their functions. That court is to try criminals 
sent to it by the National Assembly, or brought before it by 
other courses of delation. They sit under a guard to save 
their own lives. They know not by what law they judge, 
nor under what authority they act, nor by what tenure they 
hold. It is thought that they are sometimes obliged to con- 
demn at peril of their lives. This is not perhaps certain, 
nor can it be ascertained ; but when they acquit, we know 
they have seen the persons whom they discharge, with per- 
fect impunity to the actors, hanged at the door of their 
court. 

The Assembly, indeed, promises that they will form a 
body of law, which shall be short, simple, clear, and so forth. 
That is, by their short laws, they will leave much to the dis- 
cretion of the judge, whilst they have exploded the authority 
of all the learning which could make judicial discretion (a 
thing perilous at best) deserving the appellation of a sound 
discretion. 

It is curious to observe, that the administrative bodies are 
carefully exempted from the jurisdiction of these new tribu- 
nals. That is, those persons are exempted from the power 
of the laws who ought to be the most entirely submitted to 
them. Those who execute public pecuniary trusts ought of 
all men to be the most strictly held to their duty. One 
would have thought that it must have been among your ear- 
liest cares, if you did not mean that those administrative 
bodies should be real, sovereign, independent states, to form 
an awful tribunal, like your late parliaments, or like our 
King’s Bench, where all corporate officers might obtain pro- 


570 BURKE 


tection in the legal exercise of their functions, and would 
find coercion, if they trespassed against their legal duty. 
But the cause of the exemption is plain. These administra- 
tive bodies are the great instruments of the present leaders 
in their progress through democracy to oligarchy. They 
must therefore be put above the law. It will be said that the 
legal tribunals which you have made are unfit to coerce them. 
They are, undoubtedly. They are unfit for any rational 
purpose. It will be said, too, that the administrative bodies 
will be accountable to the general Assembly. This, I fear, 
is talking without much consideration of the nature of that 
Assembly or of these corporations. However, to be subject 
to the pleasure of that Assembly is not to be subject to law, 
either for protection or for constraint. 

This establishment of judges as yet wants something to 
its completion. It is to be crowned by a new tribunal. 
This is to be a grand state judicature; and it is to judge of 
crimes committed against the nation, that is, against the 
power of the Assembly. It seems as if they had something 
in their view of the nature of the high court of justice 
erected in England during the time of the great usurpation. 
As they have not yet finished this part of the scheme, it is 
impossible to forma direct judgment upon it. However, if 
great care is not taken to form it ina spirit very different 
from that which has guided them in their proceedings rela- 
tive to state offences, this tribunal, subservient to their in- 
quisition, the Committee of Research, will extinguish the 
last sparks of liberty in France, and settle the most dreadful 
and arbitrary tyranny ever known in any nation. If they 
wish to give to this tribunal any appearance of liberty and 
justice, they must not evoke from or send to it the causes 
relative to their own members, at their pleasure. They must 
also remove the seat of that tribunal out of the republic of 
Paris. 

Has more wisdom been displayed in the constitution of 
your army than what is discoverable in your plan of judica- 
ture? The able arrangement of this part is the more dif- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 571 


ficult, and requires the greater skill and attention, not only 
as a great concern in itself, but as it is the third cementing 
principle in the new body of republics which you call the 
French nation. Truly, it is not easy to divine what that 
army may become at last. You have voted a very large one, 
and on good appointments, at least fully equal to your ap- 
parent means of payment. But what is the principle of its 
discipline ? or whom is it to obey? You have got the wolf 
by the ears, and I wish you joy of the happy position in 
which you have chosen to place yourselves, and in which 
you are well circumstanced for a free deliberation relatively 
to that army, or to anything else. 

The minister and secretary of state for the War Depart- 
ment is M.de La Tour du Pin. This gentleman, like his col- 
leagues in administration, is a most zealous assertor of the 
Revolution, and a sanguine admirer of the new Constitution 
which originated in that event. His statement of facts 
relative to the military of France is important, not only from 
his official and personal authority, but because it displays 
very clearly the actual condition of the army in France, and 
because it throws light on the principles upon which the 
Assembly proceeds in the administration of this critical 
object. It may enable us to form some judgment how far 
it may be expedient in this country to imitate the martial 
policy of France. 

M. de La Tour du Pin, on the fourth of last June, comes 
to give an account of the state of his department, as it 
exists under the auspices of the National Assembly. No 
man knows it so well: no man can express it better. Ad- 
dressing himself to the National Assembly, he says,— 

“ His Majesty has this day sent me to apprise you of the 
multiplied disorders of which every day he receives the 
most distressing intelligence. The army [le corps militaire] 
threatens to fall into the most turbulent anarchy. Entire 
regiments have dared to violate at once the respect due to 
the laws, to the king, to the order established by your 
decrees, and to the oaths which they have taken with the 


572 BURKE 


most awful solemnity. Compelled by my duty to give you 
information of these excesses, my heart bleeds, when I con- 
sider who they are that have committed them. Those 
against whom it is not in my power to withhold the most 
grievous complaints are a part of that very soldiery which to 
this day have been so full of honour and loyalty, and with 
whom for fifty years I have lived the comrade and the friend. 

‘‘ What incomprehensible spirit of delirium and delusion 
has all at once led them astray? Whilst you are indefati- 
gable in establishing uniformity in the empire and moulding 
the whole into one coherent and consistent body, whilst the 
French are taught by you at once the respect which the laws 
owe to the rights of man and that which the citizens owe to 
the laws, the administration of the army presents nothing 
but disturbance and confusion. I seein more than one corps 
the bounds of discipline relaxed or broken,—the most un- 
heard-of pretensions avowed directly and without any dis- 
guise,—the ordinances without force,—the chiefs without 
authority,—the military chest and the colours carried off,— 
the authority of the king himself [rism teneatis] proudly de- 
fied,_—the officers despised, degraded, threatened, driven 
away, and some of them prisoners in the midst of their corps; 
dragging ona precarious life in the bosom of disgust and 
humiliation. To fill upthe measure of all these horrors, the 
commandants of places have had their throats cut under the 
eyes and almost in the arms of their own soldiers. 

“ These evils are great ; but they are not the worst conse- 
quences which may be produced by such military insurrec- 
tions. Sooner or later they may menace the nation itself. 
The nature of things requires that the army should never act 
but as aninstrument. The moment that, erecting itself into 
a deliberate body, it shall act according to its own resolu- 
tions, the government, be it what it may, will immediately 
degenerate into a military democracy : a species of political 
monster which has always ended by devouring those who have 
produced it. 

“ After all this, who must not be alarmed at the irregular 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 573 


consultations and turbulent committees formed in some regi- 
ments by the common soldiers and non-commissioned offi- 
cers, without the knowledge, or even in contempt of the 
authority, of their superiors?—although the presence and 
concurrence of those superiors could give no authority to 
such monstrous democratic assemblies [comices].” 

It is not necessary to add much to this finished picture,— 
finished as far as its canvas admits, but, as I apprehend, not 
taking in the whole of the nature and complexity of the dis- 
orders of this military democracy, which, the minister at 
war truly and wisely observes, wherever it exists, must be 
the true constitution of the state, by whatever formal appella- 
tion it may pass. For, though he informs the Assembly that 
the more considerable part of the army have not cast off 
their obedience, but are still attached to their duty, yet those 
travelers who have seen the corps whose conduct is the best 
rather observe in them the absence of mutiny than the exis- 
tence of discipline. 

I can not help pausing here for a moment, to reflect upon 
the expressions of surprise which this minister has let fall 
relative to the excesses he relates. To him the departure of 
the troops from their ancient principles of loyalty and honour 
seems quite inconceivable. Surely those to whom he ad- 
dresses himself know the causes of it but too well. They 
know the doctrines which they have preached, the decrees 
which they have passed, the practises which they have coun- 
tenanced. The soldiers remember the sixth of October. 
They recollect the French guards. They have not forgot the 
taking of the king’s castles in Paris and at Marseilles. That 
the governors in both places were murdered with impunity 
isa fact that has not passed out of their minds. They 
do not abandon the principles, laid down so ostentatiously 
and laboriously, of the equality of men. They can 
not shut their eyes to the degradation of the whole 
noblesse of France, and the suppression of the very idea of 
agentleman. The total abolition of titles and distinctions is 
not lost upon them. But M. du Pin is astonished at their 


574 BURKE 


disloyalty, when the doctors of the Assembly have taught 
them at thesame time the respect due to laws. It is easy to 
judge which of the two sorts of lessons men with arms in 
their hands are likely to learn. As to the authority of the 
king, we may collect from the minister himself (if any argu- 
ment on that head were not quite superfluous) that it is not 
of more consideration with these troops than it is with every- 
body else. ‘“ The king,” says he, “ has over and over again 
repeated his orders to put a stop to these excesses ; but in so 
terrible a crisis, your [the Assembly’s] concurrence is be- 
come indispensably necessary to prevent the evils which 
menace the state. You unite to the force of the legislative 
power that of opinion, still more important.” To be sure, 
the army can have no opinion of the power or authority of 
the king. Perhaps the soldier has by this time learned, 
that the Assembly itself does not enjoy a much greater 
degree of liberty than that royal figure. 

It is now to be seen what has been proposed in this ex- 
igency, one of the greatest that can happen ina state. The 
minister requests the Assembly to array itself in all its ter. 
rors, and to call forth all its majesty. He desires that the grave 
and severe principles announced by them may give vigour to 
the king’s proclamation. After this we should have looked for 
courts civil and martial, breaking of some corps, decimating of 
others, and all the terrible means which necessity has em- 
ployed in such cases to arrest the progress of the most terri- 
ble of all evils ; particularly, one might expect that a serious 
inquiry would be made into the murder of commandants in 
the view of their soldiers. Not one word of all this, or of 
anything like it. After they had been told that the soldiery 
trampled upon the decrees of the Assembly promulgated by 
the king, the Assembly pass new decrees, and they authorize 
the king to make new proclamations. After the secretary 
at war had stated that the regiments had paid no regard to 
oaths, “ prétés avec la plus imposante solennité,” they propose 
—what? More oaths. They renew decrees and proclama- 
tions as they experience their insufficiency, and they multi- 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 575 


ply oaths in proportion as they weaken in the minds of men 
the sanctions of religion. I hope that handy abridgments 
of the excellent sermons of Voltaire, D’Alembert, Diderot, 
and Helvétius, on the Immortality of the Soul, on a Partic- 
ular Superintending Providence, and on a Future State of 
Rewards and Punishments, are sent down to the soldiers 
along with their civic oaths. Of this I have no doubt; as I 
understand that a certain description of reading makes no 
inconsiderable part of their military exercises, and that they 
are full as well supplied with the ammunition of pamphlets 
as of cartridges. 

To prevent the mischiefs arising from conspiracies, irregu- 
lar consultations, seditious committees, and monstrous demo- 
cratic assemblies [comitia, comices] of the soldiers, and all 
the disorders arising from idleness, luxury, dissipation, and 
insubordination, I believe the most astonishing means have 
been used that ever occurred to men, even in all the inven- 
tions of this prolific age. It is no less than this:—The king 
has promulgated in circular letters to all the regiments his 
direct authority and encouragement, that the several corps 
should join themselves with the clubs and confederations in 
the several municipalities, and mix with them in their feasts 
and civic entertainments! This jolly discipline, it seems, is 
to soften the ferocity of their minds, to reconcile them to 
their bottle companions of other descriptions, and to merge 
particular conspiracies in more general associations.*! That 
this remedy would be pleasing to the soldiers, as they are 
described by M. de La Tour du Pin, I can readily believe,— 
and that, however mutinous otherwise, they will dutifully 
submit themselves to these royal proclamations. But I 
should question whether all this civic swearing, clubbing, 
and feasting would dispose them, more than at present they 
are disposed, to an obedience to their officers, or teach them 
better to submit to the austere rules of military discipline. 
It will make them admirable citizens after the French mode, 
but not quite so good soldiers after any mode. A doubt 
might well arise, whether the conversations at these good 


576 BURKE 


tables would fit them a great deal the better for the character 
of mere instruments, which this veteran officer and statesman 
justly observes the nature of things always requires an army 
to be. 

Concerning the likelihood of this improvement in disci- 
pline by the free conversation of the soldiers with the muni- 
cipal festive societies, which is thus officially encouraged by 
royal authority and sanction, we may judge by the state of 
the municipalities themselves, furnished to us by the war 
minister in this very speech. He conceives good hopes of 
the success of his endeavours towards restoring order for the 
present from the good disposition of certain regiments ; but 
he finds something cloudy with regard to the future. Asto | 
preventing the return of confusion, ‘‘ for this the administra- 
tion” (says he) “ can not be answerable to you, as long as 
they see the municipalities arrogate to themselves an author- 
ity over the troops which your institutions have reserved 
wholly to the monarch. You have fixed the limits of the 
military authority and the municipal authority. You have 
bounded the action which you have permitted to the latter 
over the former to the right of requisition; but never did 
the letter or the spirit of your decrees authorize the commons 
in these municipalities to break the officers, to try them, to 
give orders to the soldiers, to drive them from the posts com- 
mitted to their guard, to stop them in their marches ordered 
by the king, or, in aword, to enslave the troops to the caprice 
of each of the cities or even market-towns through which they 
are to pass.” 

Such is the character and disposition of the municipal 
society which is to reclaim the soldiery, to bring them back 
to the true principles of military subordination, and to ren- 
der them machines in the hands of the supreme power of the 
country! Such are the distempers of the French troops! 
Such is their cure! As the army is, so isthe navy. The 
municipalities supersede the orders of the Assembly, and the 
seamen in their turn supersede the orders of the municipali- 
ties. From my heart I pity the condition of a respectable 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 577 


servant of the public, like this war minister, obliged in his 
old age to pledge the Assembly in their civic cups, and to 
enter with a hoary head into all the fantastic vagaries of 
these juvenile politicians. Such schemes are not like prop- 
ositions coming from a man of fifty years’ wear and tear 
amongst mankind. They seem rather such as ought to be 
expected from those grand compounders in politics who 
shorten the road to their degrees in the state, and have a 
certain inward fanatical assurance and illumination upon all 
subjects,—upon the credit of which, one of their doctors has 
thought fit, with great applause, and greater success, to cau- 
tion the Assembly not to attend to old men, or to any per- 
sons who value themselves upon their experience. I suppose 
all the ministers of state must qualify, and take this test,— | 
wholly abjuring the errors and heresies of experience and 
observation. Every man has his own relish; but I think, if 
I could not attain to the wisdom, I would at least preserve 
something of the stiff and peremptory dignity of age. These 
gentlemen deal in regeneration: but at any price I should 
hardly yield my rigid fibres to be regenerated by them,— 
nor begin, in my grand climacteric, to squall in their new 
accents, or to stammer, in my second cradle, the elemental 
sounds of their barbarous metaphysics. “Si isti mihi largi- 
antur ut repuerascam, et in eorum cunis vagiam, valde 
recusem !” 

The imbecility of any part of the puerile and pedantic 
system which they call a Constitution can not be laid open 
without discovering the utter insufficiency and mischief of 
every other part with which it comes in contact, or that bears 
any the remotest relation to it. You can not proposea rem- 
edy for the incompetence of the crown, without displaying 
the debility of the Assembly. You can not deliberate on the 
confusion of the army of the state, without disclosing the 
worse disorders of the armed municipalities. The military 
lays open the civil, and the civil betrays the military anarchy. 
I wish everybody carefully to peruse the eloquent speech 
(such it is) of Mons. de La Tour du Pin. He attributes the 

37 


578 BURKE 


salvation of the municipalities to the good behaviour of some 
of the troops. These troops are to preserve the well-dis- 
posed part of the municipalities, which is confessed to be 
the weakest, from the pillage of the worst disposed, which is 
the strongest. But the municipalities affect a sovereignty, 
and will command those troops which are necessary for their 
protection. Indeed, they must command them or court them. 
The municipalities, by the necessity of their situation, and by 
the republican powers they have obtained, must, with rela- 
tion to the military, be the masters, or the servants, or the 
confederates, or each successively, or they must make a jum- 
ble of all together, according to circumstances. What govern- 
ment is there to coerce the army but the municipality, or the 
municipality but the army? To preserve concord where 
authority is extinguished, at the hazard of all consequences, 
the Assembly attempts to cure the distempers by the dis- 
tempers themselves; and they hope to preserve themselves 
from a purely military democracy by giving it a debauched 
interest in the municipality. 

If the soldiers once come to mix for any time in the mu- 
nicipal clubs, cabals, and confederacies, an elective attraction 
will draw them to the lowest and most desperate part. 
With them will be their habits, affections, and sympathies. 
The military conspiracies which are to be remedied by civic 
confederacies, the rebellious municipalities which are to be 
rendered obedient by furnishing them with the means of 
seducing the very armies of the state that are to keep them 
in order,—all these chimeras of a monstrous and portentous 
policy must aggravate the confusion from which they have 
arisen. There must be blood. The want of common judg- 
ment manifested in the construction of all their descriptions 
of forces, and in all their kinds of civil and judicial author- 
ities, will make it flow. Disorders may be quieted in one 
time and in one part. They will break out in others; be- 
cause the evil is radical and intrinsic. All these schemes of 
mixing mutinous soldiers with seditious citizens must weaken 
still more and more the military connection of soldiers with 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 579 


their officers, as well as add military and mutinous audacity 
to turbulent artificers and peasants. To secure a real army 
the officer should be first and last in the eye of the soldier,— 
first and last in his attention, observance, and esteem. Of- 
ficers, it seems, there are to be, whose chief qualification 
must be temper and patience. They are to manage their 
troops by electioneering arts. They must bear themselves 
as candidates, not as commanders. But as by such means 
power may be occasionally in their hands, the authority 
by which they are to be nominated becomes of high im- 
portance. 

What you may do finally does not appear: nor is it of 
much moment, whilst the strange and contradictory relation 
between your army and all the parts of your republic, as well 
as the puzzled relation of those parts to each other and to the 
whole, remain as they are. You seem to have given the 
provisional nomination of the officers, in the first instance, to 
the king, with a reserve of approbation by the National As- 
sembly. Men who have an interest to pursue are extremely 
sagacious in discovering the true seat of power. They must 
soon perceive that those who can negative indefinitely in 
reality appoint. The officers must therefore look to their 
intrigues in the Assembly as the sole certain road to promo- 
tion. Still, however, by your new Constitution, they must 
begin their solicitation at court. This double negotiation 
for military rank seems to me a contrivance, as well adapted 
as if it were studied for no other end, to promote faction in 
the Assembly itself relative to this vast ‘military patronage, 
—and then to poison the corps of officers with faction of a 
nature still more dangerous to the safety of government, 
upon any bottom on which it can be placed, and destructive 
in the end to the efficacy of the army itself. Those officers 
who lose the promotions intended for them by the crown 
must become ofa faction opposite to that of the Assembly 
which has rejected their claims, and must nourish discontents 
in the heart of the army against the ruling powers. Those 
officers, on the other hand, who, by carrying their point 


580 BURKE 


through an interest in the Assembly, feel themselves to be 
at best only second in the good-will of the crown, though 
first in that of the Assembly, must slight an authority which 
would not advance and could not retard their promotion. If, 
to avoid these evils, you will have no other rule for com- 
mand or promotion than seniority, you will have an army of 
formality ; at the same time it will become more independent . 
and more of a military republic. Not they, but the king is 
the machine. A king is not to be disposed by halves. If he 
is not everything in the command of an army, he is nothing. 
What is the effect of a power placed nominally at the head 
of the army, who to that army is no object of gratitude or of 
fear? Such acipher is not fit for the administration of an 
object of all things the most delicate, the supreme command 
of military men. They must be constrained (and their in- 
clinations lead them to what their necessities require) by a 
real, vigorous, effective, decided, personal authority. The 
authority of the Assembly itself suffers by passing through 
such a debilitating channel as they havechosen. The army 
will not long look to an Assembly acting through the organ 
of false show and palpable imposition. They will not 
seriously yield obedience to a prisoner. They will either 
despise a pageant, or they will pity a captive king. This re- 
lation of your army to the crown will, if I am not greatly 
mistaken, become a serious dilemma in your politics. 

It is besides to be considered, whether an Assembly like 
yours, even supposing that it was in possession of another 
sort of organ through which its orders were to pass, is fit for 
promoting the obedience and discipline of an army. It is 
known that armies have hitherto yielded a very precarious 
and uncertain obedience to any senate or popular authority ; 
and they will least of all yield it to an Assembly which is to 
have only a continuance of two years. The officers must 
totally lose the characteristic disposition of military men, if 
they see with perfect submission and due admiration the 
dominion of pleaders,—especially when they find that they 
have a new court to pay to an endless succession of those 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 581 


pleaders, whose military policy, and the genius of whose 
command (if they should have any), must be as uncertain as 
their duration is transient. In the weakness of one kind of 
authority, and in the fluctuation of all, the officers of an army 
will remain for some time mutinous and full of faction, until 
some popular general, who understands the art of conciliat- 
ing the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of com- 
mand, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies 
will obey him on his personal account. There is no other 
way of securing military obedience in this state of things. 
But the moment in which that event shall happen, the per- 
son who really commands the army is your master,—the 
master (that is little) of your king, the master of your As- 
sembly, the master of your whole republic. 

How came the Assembly by their present power over the 
army? Chiefly, to be sure, by debauching the soldiers from 
their officers. They have begun by a most terrible opera- 
tion. They have touched the central point about which the 
particles that compose armies are at repose. They have 
destroyed the principle of obedience in the great, essential, 
critical link between the officer and the soldier, just where 
the chain of military subordination commences, and on 
which the whole of that system depends. The soldier is told 
he is a citizen, and has the rights of man and citizen. The 
right of a man, he is told, is, to be his own governor, and to 
be ruled only by those to whom he delegates that self-govern- 
ment. It is very natural he should think that he ought 
most of all to have his choice where he is to yield the great- 
est degree of obedience. He will therefore, in all probabil- 
ity, systematically do what he does at present occasionally : 
that is, he will exercise at least a negative in the choice of 
his officers. At present the officers are known at best to be 
only permissive, and on their good behaviour. In fact, there 
have been many instances in which they have been cashiered 
by their corps. Here isa second negative on the choice of 
the king: a negative as effectual, at least, as the other of 
the Assembly. The soldiers know already that it has been a 


582 BURKE 


question, not ill received in the National Assembly, whether 
they ought not to have the direct choice of their officers, or 
some proportion of them. When such matters are in delib- 
eration, it is no extravagant supposition that they will in- 
cline to the opinion most favourable to their pretensions. 
They will not bear to be deemed the army of an imprisoned 
king, whilst another army in the same country, with whom 
too they are to feast and confederate, is to be considered as 
the free army of a free Constitution. They will cast their 
eyes on the other and more permanent army : I mean the 
municipal. That corps, they well know, does actually elect 
its own officers. They may not be able to discern the 
grounds of distinction on which they are not to elect a Mar- 
quis de La Fayette (or what is his new name ?) of their own. 
If this election of a commander-in-chief be a part of the 
rights of men, why not of theirs? They see elective justices 
of peace, elective judges, elective curates, elective bishops, 
elective municipalities, and elective commanders of the Par- 
isian army. Why shouldthey alone be excluded? Are the 
brave troops of France the only men in that nation who are 
not the fit judges of military merit, and of the qualifications 
necessary for a commander-in-chief? Are they paid by the 
state, and do they therefore lose the rights of men? They 
are a part of that nation themselves, and contribute to that 
pay. And is not the king, is not the National Assembly, 
and are not all who elect the National Assembly, likewise 
paid? Instead of seeing all these forfeit their rights by their © 
receiving a salary, they perceive that in all these cases a sal- 
ary is given for the exercise of those rights. All your resol- 
utions, all your proceedings, all your debates, all the works 
of your doctors in religion and politics, have industriously 
been put into their hands ; and you expect that they will 
apply to their own case just as much of your doctrines and 
examples as suits your pleasure. 

Everything depends upon the army in such a government 
as yours ; for you have industriously destroyed all the opin- 
ions and prejudices, and, as far.as in you lay, all the instincts 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 583 


which support government. Therefore the moment any dif- 
ference arises between your National Assembly and any part 
of the nation, you must have recourse to force. Nothing 
else is left to you,—or rather, you have left nothing else to 
yourselves. You see, by the report of your war minister, 
that the distribution of the army is ina great measure made 
with a view of internal coercion. You must rule by an 
army ; and you have infused into that army by which you rule, 
as well as into the whole body of the nation, principles which 
after a time must disable you in the use you resolve to make 
of it. The king is to call out troopsto act against his people, 
when the world has been told, and the assertion is still ringing 
in our ears, that troops ought not to fire on citizens. The 
colonies assert to themselves an independent constitution and 
a freetrade. They must beconstrained by troops. In what 
chapter of your code of the rights of men are they able to 
read that it is a part of the rights of men to have their com- 
merce monopolized and restrained for the benefit of others ? 
As the colonists rise on you, the negroes rise on them. 
Troops again,—massacre, torture, hanging! These are your 
rights of men! These are the fruits of metaphysic declara- 
tions wantonly made and shamefully retracted! It was but 
the other day that the farmers of land in one of your prov- 
inces refused to pay some sorts of rents to the lord of the 
soil. In consequence of this,you decree that the country-peo- 
ple shall pay all rentsand dues, except those which as griev- 
ances you have abolished ; and if they refuse, then you order 
the king to march troops against them. You lay down 
metaphysic propositions which infer universal consequences, 
and then you attempt to limit logic by despotism. The 
leaders of the present system tell them of their rights, as 
men, to take fortresses, to murder guards, to seize on kings 
without the least appearance of authority even from the As- 
sembly, whilst, as the sovereign legislative body, that Assem- 
bly was sitting in the name of the nation ; and yet these 
leaders presume to order out the troops which have acted in 
these very disorders, to coerce those who shall judge on the 


5384 BURKE 


principles and follow the examples which have been guaran- 
tied by their own approbation. 

The leaders teach the people to abhor and reject all feo- 
dality as the barbarism of tyranny ; and they tell them after- 
wards how much of that barbarous tyranny they are to bear 
with patience. As they are prodigal of light with regard to 
grievances, so the people find them sparing in the extreme 
with regard to redress. They know that not only certain 
quit-rents and personal duties, which you have permitted 
them to redeem, (but have furnished no money for the re- 
demption,) are as nothing to those burdens for which you 
have made no provision at all; they know that almost the 
whole system of landed property in its origin is feudal,— 
that it is the distribution of the possessions of the original 
proprietors made by a barbarous conqueror to his barbarous 
instruments,—and that the most grievous effects of the con- 
quest are the land-rents of every kind, as without question 
they are. 

The peasants, in all probability, are the descendants of 
these ancient proprietors, Romans or Gauls. But if they 
fail, in any degree, in the titles which they make on the 
principles of antiquaries and lawyers, they retreat into the 
citadel of the rights of men. There they find that men are 
equal; and the earth, the kind and equal mother of all, 
ought not to be monopolized to foster the pride and luxury 
of any men, who by nature are no better than themselves, 
and who, if they do not labour for their bread, are worse. 
They find, that, by the laws of Nature, the occupant and 
subduer of the soil is the true proprietor,—that there is no 
prescription against Nature,—and that the agreements 
(where any there are) which have been made with the land- 
lords during the time of slavery are only the effect of duresse 
and force,—and that, when the people re-entered into the 
rishts of men, those agreements were made as void as every- 
thing else which had been settled under the prevalence of the 
old feudal and aristocratic tyranny. They will tell you that 
they see no difference between an idler with a hat anda 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 585 


national cockade and an idler in a cowl or inarochet. If 
you ground the title to rents on succession and prescription, 
they tell you from the speech of M. Camus, published by 
the National Assembly for their information, that things ill 
begun can not avail themselves of prescription,—that the 
title of these lords was vicious in its origin,—and that force 
is at least as bad as fraud. As to the title by succession, 
they will tell you that the succession of those who have 
cultivated the soil is the true pedigree of property, and not 
rotten parchments and silly substitutions,—that the lords 
have enjoyed their usurpation too long,—and that, if they 
allow to these lay monks any charitable pension, they ought 
to be thankful to the bounty of the true proprietor, who is 
so generous towards a false claimant to his goods. 

When the peasants give you back that coin of sophistic 
reason on which you have set your image and superscrip- 
tion, you cry it down as base money, and tell them you will 
pay for the future with French guards and dragoons and 
hussars. You hold up, to chastise them, the second-hand 
authority of a king, who is only the instrument of destroy- 
ing, without any power of protecting either the people or 
his own person. Through him, it seems, you will make 
yourselves obeyed. They answer,—‘‘ You have taught us 
that there are no gentlemen; and which of your principles 
teach us to bow to kings whom we have not elected? We 
know, without your teaching, that lands were given for the 
support of feudal dignities, feudal titles, and feudal offices. 
When you took down the cause as a grievance, why should 
the more grievous effect remain? As there are now no 
hereditary honours and no distinguished families, why are 
we taxed to maintain what you tell us ought not to exist ? 
You have sent down our old aristocratic landlords in no 
other character and with no other title but that of exactors 
under your authority. Have you endeavoured to make these 
your rent-gatherers respectable to us? No. You have sent 
them to us with their arms reversed, their shields broken, 
their impresses defaced,—and so displumed, degraded, and 


586 BURKE 


metamorphosed, such unfeathered two-legged things, that 
we no longer know them. They are strangers to us. They 
do not even go by the names of ourancient lords. Physically 
they may be the same men,—though we are not quite sure 
of that, on your new philosophic doctrines of personal iden- 
tity. In all other respects they are totally changed. We 
do not see why we have not as good a right to refuse them 
their rents as you have to abrogate all their honours, titles, 
and distinctions. This we have never commissioned you to 
do; and it is one instance among many, indeed, of your as- 
sumption of undelegated power. We see the burghers of 
Paris, through their clubs, their mobs, and their national 
guards, directing you at their pleasure, and giving that as 
law to you, which, under your authority, is transmitted as law 
to us. Through you, these burghers dispose of the lives and 
fortunes of us all. Why should not you attend as much to 
the desires of the laborious husbandman with regard to our 
rent, by which we are affected in the most serious manner, 
as you do to the demands of these insolent burghers relative 
to distinctions and titles of honour, by which neither they 
nor we are affected at all? But we find you pay more 
regard to their fancies than to our necessities. Is it among 
the rights of man to pay tribute to his equals? Before this 
measure of yours we might have thought we were not per- 
fectly equal; we might have entertained some old, habitual, 
unmeaning prepossession in favour of those landlords; but 
we can not conceive with what other view than that of des- 
troying all respect to them you could have made the law 
that degrades them. You have forbidden us to treat them 
with any of the old formalities of respect; and now you 
send troops to sabre and to bayonet us into a submission to 
fear and force which you did not suffer us to yield to the 
mild authority of opinion.” 

The ground of some of these arguments is horrid and 
ridiculous to all rational ears; but to the politicians of meta- 
physics, who have opened schools for sophistry, and made 
establishments for anarchy, it is solid and conclusive. It 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 587 


is obvious, that, on a mere consideration of the right, the 
leaders in the Assembly would not in the least have scrupled 
to abrogate the rents along with the titles and family ensigns. 
It would be only to follow up the principle of their reason- 
ings, and to complete the analogy of their conduct. But they 
had newly possessed themselves of a great body of landed 
property by confiscation. They had this commodity at 
market ; and the market would have been wholly destroyed, 
if they were to permit the husbandmen to riot in the specula- 
tions with which they so freely intoxicated themselves. The 
only security which property enjoysin any one of its descrip- 
tions is from the interests of their rapacity with regard to 
some other. They have left nothing but their own arbitrary 
pleasure to determine what property is to be protected and 
what subverted. 

Neither have they left any principle by which any of their 
municipalities can be bound to obedience,—or even con- 
scientiously obliged not to separate from the whole, to be- 
come independent, or to connect itself with some other state. 
The people of Lyons, it seems, have refused lately to pay 
taxes. Why should they not? What lawful authority is 
there left to exact them? The king imposed some of them. 
The old States, methodized by orders, settled the more an- 
cient. They may say to the Assembly,—‘ Who are you, 
that are not our kings, nor the States we have elected, nor 
sit on the principles on which we have elected you? And 
who are we, that, when we see the gabelles which you have 
ordered to be paid wholly shaken off, when we see the act 
of disobedience afterwards ratified by yourselves, who are 
we, that we are not to judge what taxes we ought or ought 
not to pay, and are not to avail ourselves of the same pow- 
ers the validity of which you have approved in others?” 
To this the answer is, ‘We will send troops.” The last 
reason of kings is always the first with your Assembly. 
This military aid may serve for a time, whilst the impression 
of the increase of pay remains, and the vanity of being um- 
pires in all disputes is flattered. But this weapon will snap 


588 BURKE 


short, unfaithful to the hand that employs it. The Assem- 
bly keep a school, where, systematically, and with unremit- 
ting perseverance, they teach principles and form regula- 
tions destructive to all spirit of subordination, civil and 
military,—and then they expect that they shall hold in obe- 
dience an anarchic people by an anarchic army. 

The municipal army, which, according to their new policy, 
is to balance this national army, if considered in itself only, 
is of a constitution much more simple, and in every respect 
less exceptionable. It is a mere democratic body, uncon- 
nected with the crown or the kingdom, armed and trained 
and officered at the pleasure of the districts to which the 
corps severally belong; and the personal service of the in- 
dividuals who compose, or the fine in lieu of personal service, 
are directed by the same authority.“ Nothing is more uni- 
form. If, however, considered in any relation to the crown, 
to the National Assembly, to the public tribunals, or to the 
other army, or considered in a view to any coherence or con- 
nection between its parts, it seems a monster, and can hardly 
fail to terminate its perplexed movements in some great 
national calamity. It is a worse preservative of a general 
constitution than the systasis of Crete, or the confederation 
of Poland, or any other ill-devised corrective which has yet 
been imagined, in the necessities produced by an ill-con- 
structed system of government. 


Having concluded my few remarks on the constitution of 
the supreme power, the executive, the judicature, the mili- 
tary, and on the reciprocal relation of all these establish- 
ments, I shall say something of the ability shown by your 
legislators with regard to the revenue. 

In their proceedings relative to this object, if possible, still 
fewer traces appear of political judgment or financial resource. 
When the States met, it seemed to be the great object to im- 
prove the system of revenue, to enlarge its collection, to cleanse 
it of oppression and vexation, and to establish it on the most 
solid footing. Great were the expectations entertained on 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 589 


that head throughout Europe. It was by this grand arrange- 
ment that France was to stand or fall; and this became, in 
my opinion very properly, the test by which the skill and 
patriotism of those who ruled in that Assembly would be 
tried. The revenue of the state is the state. In effect, all 
depends upon it, whether for support or for reformation. 
The dignity of every occupation wholly depends upon the 
quantity and the kind of virtue that may be exerted in it. 
As all great qualities of the mind which operate in public, 
and are not merely suffering and passive, require force for 
their display, I had almost said for their unequivocal exist- 
ence, the revenue, which is the spring of all power, becomes 
in its administration the sphere of every active virtue. Pub- 
lic virtue, being of a nature magnificent and splendid, insti- 
tuted for great things, and conversant about great concerns, 
requires abundant scope and room, and can not spread and 
grow under confinement, and in circumstances straitened, 
narrow, and sordid. Through the revenue alone the body 
politic can act in its true genius and character ; and therefore 
it will display just as much of its collective virtue, and as 
much of that virtue which may characterize those who move 
it, and are, as it were, its life and guiding principle, as it is 
possessed of a just revenue. For from hence not only mag- 
nanimity, and liberality, and beneficence, and fortitude, and 
providence, and the tutelary protection of all good arts derive 
their food, and the growth of their organs, but continence, and 
self-denial, and labour, and vigilance, and frugality, and what- 
ever else there is in which the mind shows itself above the 
appetite, are nowhere more in their proper element than in 
the provision and distribution of the public wealth. It is 
therefore not without reason that the science of speculative 
and practical finance, which must take to its aid so many 
auxiliary branches of knowledge, stands high in the estima- 
tion not only of the ordinary sort, but of the wisest and best 
men ; and as this science has grown with the progress of its 
object, the prosperity and improvement of nations has gener- 
ally increased with the increase of their revenues; and they 


590 BURKE 


will both continue to grow and flourish as long as the balance 
between what is left to strengthen the efforts of individuals 
and what is collected for the common efforts of the state bear 
to each other a due reciprocal proportion, and are kept ina 
close correspondence and communication. And perhaps it 
may be owing to the greatness of revenues, and to the ur- 
gency of state necessities, that old abuses in the constitution 
of finances are discovered, and their true nature and rational » 
theory comes to be more perfectly understood; insomuch 
that a smaller revenue might have been more distressing in 
one period than a far greater is found to be in another, the 
proportionate wealth even remaining the same. In this state 
of things, the French Assembly found something in their 
revenues to preserve, to secure, and wisely to administer, as 
well as to abrogate and alter. Though their proud assump- 
tion might justify the severest tests, yet, in trying their abili- 
ties on their financial proceedings, I would only consider 
what is the plain, obvious duty of a common finance minister, 
and try them upon that, and not upon models of ideal per- 
fection. 

The objects of a financier are, then, to secure an ample 
revenue; to impose it with judgment and equality; to em- 
ploy it economically; and when necessity obliges him to 
make use of credit, to secure its foundations in that instance, 
and forever, by the clearness and candour of his proceedings, 
the exactness of his calculations, and the solidity of his funds. 
On these heads we may take a short and distinct view of the 
merits and abilities of those in the National Assembly who 
have taken to themselves the management of this arduous 
concern. 

Far from any increase of revenue in their hands, I find, by 
a report of M. Vernier, from the Committee of Finances, of 
the second of August last, that the amount of the national 
revenue, as compared with its produce before the Revolution, 
was diminished by the sum of two hundred millions, or eight 
millions sterling, of the annual income,—considerably more 
than one third of the whole. 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 591 


If this be the result of great ability, never surely was 
ability displayed in a more distinguished manner or with so 
powerful an effect. Nocommon folly, no vulgar incapacity, 
no ordinary official negligence, even no official crime, no 
corruption, no peculation, hardly any direct hostility, which 
we have seen inthe modern world, could in so short a time 
have made so complete an overthrow of the finances, and, 
with them, of the strength of a great kingdom.—Cedo qui 
vestram rempublicam tantam amisistis tam cito? 

The sophisters and declaimers, as soon as the Assembly 
met, began with decrying the ancient constitution of the re- 
venue in many of its most essential branches, such as the 
public monopoly of salt. They charged it, as truly as un- 
wisely, with being ill-contrived, oppressive, and partial. This 
representation they were not satisfied to make use of in 
speeches preliminary to some plan of reform; they declared 
it in a solemn resolution or public sentence, as it were judi- 
cially passed upon it; and this they dispersed throughout 
the nation. At the time they passed the decree, with the 
same gravity they ordered the same absurd, oppressive, and 
partial tax to be paid, until they could find a revenue to re- 
place it. The consequence was inevitable. The provinces 
which had been always exempted from this salt monopoly, 
some of whom were charged with other contributions, per- 
haps equivalent, were totally disinclined to bear any part of 
the burden, which by an equal distribution was to redeem 
the others. As to the Assembly, occupied as it was with 
the declaration and violation of the rights of men, and with 
their arrangements for general confusion, it had neither leisure 
nor capacity to contrive, nor authority to enforce, any plan 
of any kind relative to the replacing the tax, or equalizing it, 
or compensating the provinces, or for conducting their minds 
to any scheme of accommodation with the other districts 
which were to be relieved. The people of the salt provinces, 
impatient under taxes damned by the authority which had 
directed their payment, very soon found their patience ex- 
hausted. They thought themselves as skilful in demolishing 


592 BURKE 


as the Assembly could be. They relieved themselves by 
throwing off the whole burden. Animated by this example, 
each district, or part of a district, judging of its own griev- 
ance by its own feeling, and of its remedy by its own opin- 
ion, did as it pleased with other taxes. 

We are next to see how they have conducted themselves 
in contriving equal impositions, proportioned to the means 
of the citizens, and the least likely to lean heavy on the 
active capital employed in the generation of that private 
wealth from whence the public fortune must bederived. By 
suffering the several districts, and several of the individuals 
in each district, to judge of what part of the old revenue they 
might withhold, instead of better principles of equality,a new 
inequality was introduced of the most oppressive kind. 
Payments were regulated by dispositions. The parts of the 
kingdom which were the most submissive, the most orderly, 
or the most affectionate to the commonwealth, bore the 
whole burden of the state. Nothing turns out to be so op- 
pressive and unjust as a feeble government. To fill up all 
the deficiencies in the old impositions, and the new deficien- 
cies of every kind which were to be expected, what remained to 
a state without authority ? The National Assembly called for 
a voluntary benevolence,—for a fourth part of the income of 
all the citizens, to be estimated on the honour of those who 
were to pay. They obtained something more than could be 
rationally calculated, but what was far indeed from answer- 
able to their real necessities, and much less to their fond ex- 
pectations. Rational people could have hoped for little 
from this their tax in the disguise of a benevolence, —a tax 
weak, ineffective, and unequal,—a tax by which luxury, 
avarice, and selfishness were screened, and the load thrown 
upon productive capital, upon integrity, generosity, and 
public spirit,—a tax of regulation upon virtue. At length 
the mask is thrown off, and they are now trying means (with 
little success) of exacting their benevolence by force. 

This benevolence, the rickety offspring of weakness, was 
to be supported by another resource, the twin brother of the 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 593 


same prolific imbecility. Th® patriotic donations were to 
make good the failure of the patriotic contribution, John 
Doe was to become security for Richard Roe. By this 
scheme they took things of much price from the giver, com- 
paratively of small value to the receiver ; they ruined several 
trades ; they pillaged the crown of its ornaments, the churches 
of their plate, and the people of their personal decora- 
tions. The invention of those juvenile pretenders to liberty 
wasin reality nothing more than a servileimitation of one of 
the poorest resources of doting despotism. They took an 
old, huge, full-bottomed periwig out of the wardrobe of the 
antiquated frippery of Louis the Fourteenth, to cover the 
premature baldness of the National Assembly. They pro- 
duced this old-fashioned formal folly, though it had been so 
abundantly exposed in the Memoirs of the Duke de Saint- 
Simon,—if to reasonable men it had wanted any arguments 
to display its mischief and insufficiency. A device of the 
same kind was tried in my memory by Louis the Fifteenth, 
but it answered at no time. However, the necessities of 
ruinous wars were some excuse for desperate projects. The 
deliberations of calamity are rarely wise. But here was a 
season for disposition and providence. It was in a time of 
profound peace, then enjoyed for five years, and promising 
a much longer continuance, that they had recourse to this 
desperate trifling. They were sure to lose more reputation 
by sporting, in their serious situation, with these toys and 
playthings of finance, which have filled half their journals, 
than could possibly be compensated by the poor temporary 
supply which they afforded. It seemed as if those who 
adopted such projects were wholly ignorant of their circum- 
stances, or wholly unequal to their necessities. Whatever 
virtue may be in these devices, it is obvious that neither the 
patriotic gifts nor the patriotic contribution can ever be 
resorted to again. The resources of public folly are soon 
exhausted. The whole, indeed, of their scheme of revenue 
is to make, by any artifice, an appearance of a full reservoir 
for Bae hour, whilst at the same time they cut off the 
3 


594 BURKE 


springs and living fountains of perennial supply. The ac- 
count not long since furnished by M. Necker was meant, 
without question, to be favourable. He gives a flattering 
view of the means of getting through the year; but he ex- 
presses, as it is natural he should, some apprehension for 
that which was to succeed. On this last prognostic, instead 
of entering into the grounds of apprehension, in order, by a 
proper foresight, to prevent the prognosticated evil, M. 
Necker receives a sort of friendly reprimand from the Pres- 
ident of the Assembly. 

As to their other schemes of taxation, it is impossible to 
say anything of them with certainty, because they have not 
yet had their operation; but nobody is so sanguine as to 
imagine they will fill up any perceptible part of the wide 
gaping breach which their incapacity has made in their reve- 
nues. At present the state of theirtreasury sinks every day 
more and more in cash, and swells more and more in ficti- 
tious representation. When so little within or without is 
now found but paper, the representative not of opulence, 
but of want, the creature not of credit, but of power, they 
imagine that our flourishing state in England is owing to 
that bank-paper, and not the bank-paper to the flourishing 
condition of our commerce, to the solidity of our credit, and 
to the total exclusion of all idea of power from any part of 
the transaction. They forget that in England not one shil- 
ling of paper money of any description is received but of 
choice,—that the whole has had its origin in cash actually 
deposited,—and that it is convertible at pleasure, in an in- 
stant, and without the smallest loss, into cash again. Our 
paper is of value in commerce, because in law it is of none. 
It is powerful on ’Change, because in Westminster Hall it is 
impotent. In payment of a debt of twenty shillings a 
creditor may refuse all the paper of the Bank of England. 
Nor is there amongst us a single public security, of any 
quality or nature whatsoever, that is enforced by authority. 
In fact, it might be easily shown that our paper wealth, in- 
stead of lessening the real coin, has a tendency to increase 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 595 


it,—instead of being a substitute for money, it only facili- 
tates its entry, its exit, and its circulation,—that it is the 
symbol of prosperity, and not the badge of distress. Never 
was a scarcity of cash and an exuberance of paper a subject 
of complaint in this nation. 

Well! but a lessening of prodigal expenses, and the 
economy which has been introduced by the virtuous and 
sapient Assembly, make amends for the losses sustained in 
the receipt of revenue. In this at least they have fulfilled 
the duty of a financier.—Have those who say so looked at 
the expenses of the National Assembly itself? of the muni- 
cipalities? of the city of Paris? of the increased pay of the 
two armies? of the new police? of the new judicatures? 
Have they even carefully compared the present pension-list 
with the former? These politicians have been cruel, not 
economical. Comparing the expenses of the former prodi- 
gal government and its relation to the then revenues with 
the expenses of this new system as opposed to the state of 
its new treasury, I believe the present will be found beyond 
all comparison more chargeable.* 

It remains only to consider the proofs of financial ability 
furnished by the present French managers when they are to 
raise supplies on credit. Here I ama little at a stand; for 
credit, properly speaking, they have none. The credit of 
the ancient government was not, indeed, the best; but they 
could always, on some terms, command money, not only at 
home, but from most of the countries of Europe where a 
surplus capital was accumulated; and the credit of that 
government was improving daily. The establishment of a 
system of liberty would of course be supposed to give it new 
strength: and so it would actually have done, if a system of 
liberty had been established. What offers has their govern- 
ment of pretended liberty had from Holland, from Ham- 
burg, from Switzerland, from Genoa, from England, for a 
dealing in their paper? Why should these nations of com- 
merce and economy enter into any pecuniary dealings with 
a people who attempt to reverse the very nature of things,— 


596 BURKE 


amongst whom they see the debtor prescribing at the point 
of the bayonet the medium of his solvency to the creditor, 
discharging one of his engagements with another, turning 
his very penury into his resource, and paying his interest 
with his rags ? ) 

Their fanatical confidence in the omnipotence of Church 
plunder has induced these philosophers to overlook all care 
of the public estate, just as the dream of the philosopher's 
stone induces dupes, under the more plausible delusion of 
the hermetic art, to neglect all rational means of improving 
their fortunes. With these philosophic financiers, this uni- 
versal medicine made of Church mummy is to cure all the 
evils of the state. These gentlemen perhaps do not believe 
a great deal in the miracles of piety ; but it can not be ques- 
tioned that they have an undoubting faith in the prodigies 
of sacrilege. Is there a debt which presses them? Issue as- 
signats. Are compensations to be made ora maintenance 
decreed to those whom they have robbed of their freehold in 
their office or expelled from their profession? Assignats. 
Is a fleet to be fitted out? Assignats. If sixteen millions 
sterling of these assignats forced on the people leave the 
wants of the state as urgent as ever, Issue, says one, thirty 
millions sterling of assignats,—says another, Issue fourscore 
millions more of assignats. The only difference among their 
financial factions is on the greater or the lesser quantity of 
assignats to be imposed on the public sufferance. They are 
all professors of assignats. Even those whose natural good 
sense and knowledge of commerce, not obliterated by philos- 
ophy, furnish decisive arguments against this delusion, con- 
clude their arguments by proposing the emission of assignats. 
I suppose they must talk of assignats, asno other language 
would be understood. All experience of their inefficacy 
does not in the least discourage them. Are the old assig- 
nats depreciated at market? What isthe remedy? Issue 
new assignats.—Mais si maladia opiniatria non vult se garire, 
quid illi facere? Assignare; postea assignare; ensuita as- 
signare. The word isa trifle altered. The Latin of your 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 597 


present doctors may be better than that of your old comedy ; 
their wisdom and the variety of their resources are the same. 
They have not more notes in their song than the cuckoo ; 
though, far from the softness of that harbinger of summer 
and plenty, their voice is as harsh and as ominous as that of 
the raven. 

Who but the most desperate adventuress in philosophy and 
finance could at all have thought of destroying the settled 
revenue of the state, the sole security for the public credit, 
in the hope of rebuilding it with the materials of confiscated 
property? If, however, an excessive zeal for the state should 
have led a pious and venerable prelate (by anticipation a 
father of the Church)® to pillage his own order, and, for the 
good of the Church and people, to take upon himself the 
place of grand financier of confiscation and comptroller-gen- 
eral of sacrilege, he and his coadjutors were, in my opinion, 
bound to show, by their subsequent conduct, that they knew 
something of the office they assumed. When they had 
resolved to appropriate to the fisc a certain portion of the 
landed property of their conquered country, it was their busi- 
ness to render their bank a real fund of credit,—as far as 
such a bank was capable of becoming so. 

To establish a current circulating credit upon any land- 
bank, under any circumstances whatsoever, has hitherto 
proved difficult at the very least. The attempt has com- 
monly ended in bankruptcy. But when the Assembly were 
led, through a contempt of moral, to a defiance of economi- 
cal principles, it might at least have been expected that 
nothing would be omitted on their part to lessen this diffi- 
culty, to prevent any aggravation of this bankruptcy. It 
might be expected, that, to render your land-bank tolerable, 
every means would be adopted that could display openness 
and candour in the statement of the security, everything which 
could aid the recovery of the demand. To take things in 
their most favourable point of view, your condition was that 
of a man of a large landed estate which he wished to dispose 
of for the discharge of a debt and the supply of certain 


598 BURKE 


services. Not being able instantly to sell, you wished to mort- 
gage. What woulda man of fair intentions and a commonly 
clear understanding do in such circumstances? Ought he 
not first to ascertain the gross value of the estate, the charges 
of its management and disposition, the incumbrances perpet- 
ual and temporary of all kinds that affect it,--then, striking 
a net surplus, to calculate the just value of the security ? 
When that surplus (the only security to the creditor) had 
been clearly ascertained, and properly vested in the hands 
of trustees, then he would indicate the parcels to be sold, 
and the time and conditions of sale; after this he would 
admit the public creditor, if he chose it, to subscribe his stock 
into this new fund,—or he might receive proposals for an 
assignat from those who would advance money to purchase 
this species of security. This would be to proceed like men 
of business, methodically and rationally, and on the only 
principles of public and private credit that have an existence. 
The dealer would then know exactly what he purchased ; 
and the only doubt which could hang upon his mind would 
be the dread of the resumption of the spoil, which one day 
might be made (perhaps with an addition of punishment) 
from the sacrilegious gripe of those execrable wretches who 
could become purchasers at the auction of their innocent 
fellow-citizens. 

An open and exact statement of the clear value of the 
property, and of the time, the circumstances, and the place 
of sale, were all necessary, to efface as much as possible the 
stigma that has hitherto been branded on every kind of 
land-bank. It became necessary on another principle,—that 
is, on account of a pledge of faith previously given on that 
subject, that their future fidelity in a slippery concern might 
be established by their adherence to their first engagement. 
When they had finally determined on a state resource from 
Church booty, they came, on the fourteenth of April, 1790, 
to a solemn resolution on the subject, and pledged them- 
selves to their country, “that, in the statement of the public 
charges for each year, there should be brought to account a 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 599 


sum sufficient for defraying the expenses of the R.C. A. 
religion, the support of the ministers at the altars, the relief 
of the poor, the pensions to the ecclesiastics, secular as well 
as regular, of the one and of the other sex, in order that the 
estates and goods which are at the disposal of the nation 
may be disengaged of all charges, and employed by the 
representatives, or the legislative body, to the great and most 
pressing exigencies of the state.’”’ They further engaged, on 
the same day, that the sum necessary for the year 1791 should 
be forthwith determined. 

In this resolution they admit it their duty to show dis- 
tinctly the expense of the above objects, which, by other 
resolutions, they had before engaged should be first in the 
order of provision. They admit that they ought to show 
the estate clear and disengaged of all charges, and that they 
should show it immediately. Have they done this immedi- 
ately, or at anytime? Have they ever furnished a rent-roll 
of the immovable estate, or given in an inventory of the 
movable effects, which they confiscate to their assignats? In 
what manner they can fulfil their engagements of holding 
out to public service ‘an estate disengaged of all charges,” 
without authenticating the value of the estate or the quan- 
tum of the charges, I leave it to their English admirers to 
explain. Instantly upon this assurance, and previously to 
any one step towards making it good, they issue, on the 
credit of so handsome a declaration, sixteen millions sterling 
of their paper. This was manly. Who, after this masterly 
stroke, can doubt of their abilities in finance ?—But then, 
before any other emission of these financial indulgences, they 
took care at least to make good their original promise.—If 
such estimate, either of the value of the estate or the amount 
of the incumbrances, has been made, it has escaped me. I 
never heard of it. 

At length they have spoken out, and they have made a 
full discovery of their abominable fraud in holding out the 
Church lands as a security for any debts or any service what- 
soever. They rob only to enable them to cheat; but in a 


600 BURKE 


very short time they defeat the ends both of the robbery and 
the fraud, by making out accounts for other purposes, which 
blow up their whole apparatus of force and of deception. I 
am obliged to M. de Calonne for his reference to the docu- 
ment which proves this extraordinary fact: it had by some 
means escaped me. Indeed, it was not necessary to make 
out my assertion as to the breach of faith on the declaration 
of the fourteenth of April, 1790. By a report of their com- 
mittee it now appears that the charge of keeping up the 
reduced ecclesiastical establishments, and other expenses 
attendant on religion, and maintaining the religious of both 
sexes, retained or pensioned, and the other concomitant 
expenses of the same nature, which they have brought upon 
themselves by this convulsion in property, exceeds the in- 
come of the estates acquired by it in the enormous sum of 
two millions sterling annually,—besides a debt of seven mil- 
lions and upwards. These are the calculating powers of im- 
posture! This is the finance of philosophy! This is the 
result of all the delusions held out to engage a miserable 
people in rebellion, murder, and sacrilege, and to make them 
prompt and zealous instruments in the ruin of their country! 
Never did a state, in any case, enrich itself by the confisca- 
tions of the citizens. This new experiment has succeeded 
like all the rest. Every honest mind, every true lover of 
liberty and humanity, must rejoice to find that injustice is 
not always good policy, nor rapine the high-road to riches. 
I subjoin with pleasure, in a note, the able and spirited obser- 
vations of M. de Calonne on this subject.5” 

In order to persuade the world of the bottomless resource 
of ecclesiastical confiscation, the Assembly have proceeded 
to other confiscations of estates in offices, which could not 
be done with any common colour without being compensated 
out of this grand confiscation of landed property. They 
have thrown upon this fund, which was to show a surplus 
disengaged of all charges, a new charge, namely, the com- 
pensation to the whole body of the disbanded judicature, 
and of all suppressed offices and estates: a charge which I 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 601 


can not ascertain, but which unquestionably amounts to 
many French millions. Another of the new charges is an 
annuity of four hundred and eighty thousand pounds sterling, 
to be paid (if they choose to keep faith) by daily payments, 
for the interest of the first assignats. Have they ever given 
themselves the trouble to state fairly the expense of the 
management of the Church lands in the hands of the muni- 
cipalities, to whose care, skill, and diligence, and that of their 
legion of unknown under-agents, they have chosen to commit 
the charge of the forfeited estates, and the consequence of 
which had been so ably pointed out by the Bishop of Nancy? 

But it is unnecessary to dwell on these obvious heads of 
incumbrance. Have they made out any clear state of the 
grand incumbrance of all, I mean the whole of the general 
and municipal establishments of all sorts, and compared it 
with the regular income by revenue? Every deficiency in 
these becomes a charge on the confiscated estate, before the 
creditor can plant his cabbages on an acre of Church prop- 
erty. There isno other prop than this confiscation to keep 
the whole state from tumbling tothe ground. In this 
situation they have purposely covered all, that they ought 
industriously to have cleared, with a thick fog; and then, 
blindfold themselves, like bulls that shut their eyes when 
they push, they drive, by the point of the bayonets, their 
slaves, blindfolded indeed no worse than their lords, to take 
their fictions for currencies, and to swallow down paper pills 
by thirty-four millions sterling at a dose. Then they 
proudly lay in their claim to a future credit, on failure of all 
their past engagements, and at a time when (if in sucha 
matter anything can be clear) it is clear that the surplus 
estates will never answer even the first of their mortgages,— 
I mean that of the four hundred millions (or sixteen millions 
sterling) of assignats. In all this procedure I can discern 
neither the solid sense of plain dealing nor the subtle dex- 
terity of ingenious fraud. The objections within the As- 
sembly to pulling up the flood-gates for this inundation of 
fraud are unanswered; but they are thoroughly refuted by 


602 BURKE 


an hundred thousand financiers in the street. These are the 
numbers by which the metaphysic arithmeticians compute. 
These are the grand calculations on which a philosophical 
public credit is founded in France. They can not raise 
supplies; but they can raise mobs. Let them rejoice in the 
applauses of the club at Dundee for their wisdom and patri- 
otism in having thus applied the plunder of the citizens to 
the service of the state. I hear of no address upon this 
subject from the directors of the Bank of England,—though 
their approbation would be of a little more weight in the 
scale of credit than that of the club at Dundee. But to do 
justice to the club, I believe the gentlemen who compose it 
to be wiser than they appear,—that they will be less liberal 
of their money than of their addresses, and that they would 
not give a dog’s ear of their most rumpled and ragged 
Scotch paper for twenty of your fairest assignats. 

Early in this year the Assembly issued paper to the 
amount of sixteen millions sterling. What must have been 
the state into which the Assembly has brought your affairs, 
that the relief afforded by so vast a supply has been hardly 
perceptible? This paper also felt an almost immediate de- 
preciation of five per cent, which in a little time came to 
about seven. The effect of these assignats on the receipt 
of the revenue is remarkable. M. Necker found that the 
collectors of the revenue, who received in coin, paid the 
treasury in assignats. The collectors made seven per cent 
by thus receiving in money, and accounting in depreciated 
paper. It was not very difficult to foresee that this must be 
inevitable. It was, however, not the less embarrassing. M. 
Necker was obliged (I believe, for a considerable part, in the 
market of London) to buy gold and silver for the mint, 
which amounted to about twelve thousand pounds above 
the value of the commodity gained. That minister was of 
opinion, that, whatever their secret nutritive virtue might be, 
the state could not live upon assignats alone,—that some real 
silver was necessary, particularly for the satisfaction of those 
who, having iron in their hands, were not likely to distinguish 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 603 


themselves for patience, when they should perceive, that, 
whilst an increase of pay was held out to them in real money, 
it was again to be fraudulently drawn back by depreciated 
paper. The minister, in this very natural distress, applied 
to the Assembly, that they should order the collectors to 
pay in specie what in specie they had received. It could 
not escape him, that, if the Treasury paid three per cent for 
the use of a currency which should be returned seven per 
cent worse than the minister issued it, such a dealing could 
not very greatly tend to enrich the public. The Assembly 
took no notice of his recommendation. They were in this 
dilemma: If they continued to receive the assignats, cash 
must become an alien to their Treasury; if the Treasury 
should refuse those paper amulets, or should discountenance 
them in any degree, they must destroy the credit of their 
sole resource. They seem, then, to have made their option, 
and to have given some sort of credit to their paper by 
taking it themselves; at the same time, in their speeches, 
they made a sort of swaggering declaration, something, I 
rather think, above legislative competence,—that is, that 
there is no difference in value between metallic money and 
their assignats. This was a good, stout, proof article of 
faith, pronounced under an anathema by the venerable 
fathers of this philosophic synod. Credat who will,—cer- 
tainly not Judzeus Apella. 

A noble indignation rises in the minds of your popular 
leaders, on hearing the magic-lantern in their show of finance 
compared to the fraudulent exhibitions of Mr. Law. They 
can not bear to hear the sands of his Mississippi compared 
with the rock of the Church, on which they build their 
system. Pray let them suppress this glorious spirit, until 
they show to the world what piece of solid ground there is 
for their assignats, which they have not preoccupied by 
other charges. They do injustice to that great mother 
fraud, to compare it with their degenerate imitation. It is 
not true that Law built solely on a speculation concerning 
the Mississippi. He added the East India trade; he added 


604 BURKE 


the African trade; he added the farms of all the farmed 
revenue of France. Allthese together unquestionably could 
not support the structure which the public enthusiasm, not 
he, chose to build upon these bases. But these were, how- 
over, in comparison, generous delusions. They supposed, 
and they aimed at, an increase of the commerce of France. 
They opened to it the whole range of the two hemispheres. 
They did not think of feeding France from its own substance. 
A grand imagination found in this flight of commerce some- 
thing to captivate. It was wherewithal to dazzle the eye of 
an eagle. It was not made to entice the smell of a mole, 
nuzzling and burying himself in his mother earth, as yours 
is. Men were not then quite shrunk from their natural dim- 
ensions by a degrading and sordid philosophy, and fitted for 
low and vulgar deceptions. Above all, remember, that, in 
imposing on the imagination, the then managers of the 
system made acompliment to the freedom of men. In their 
fraud there was no mixture of force. This was reserved to 
our time, to quench the little glimmerings of reason which 
might break in upon the solid darkness of this enlightened 
age. 

On recollection, I have said nothing of a scheme of finance 
which may be urged in favour of the abilities of these gentle- 
men, and which has been introduced with great pomp, though 
not yet finally adopted in the National Assembly. It comes 
with something solid in aid of the credit of the paper circula- 
tion ; andmuch has been said of its utility and its elegance. 
I mean the project for coining into money the bells of the 
suppressed churches. This is their alchemy. There are 
some follies which baffle argument, which go beyond ridi- 
cule, and which excite no feeling in us but disgust; and 
therefore I say no more upon it. 

It is as little worth remarking any farther upon all their 
drawing and re-drawing, on their circulation for putting off 
the evil day, on the play between the Treasury and the 
Caisse d’Escompte, and on all these old, exploded con- 
trivances of mercantile fraud, now exalted into policy of 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 605 


state. The revenue will not be trifled with. The prattling 
about the rights of men will not be accepted in payment of 
a biscuit or a pound of gunpowder. Here, then, the meta- 
physicians descend from their airy speculations, and faith- 
fully follow examples. What examples? The examples of 
bankrupts. But defeated, baffled, disgraced, when their 
breath, their strength, their inventions, their fancies desert 
them, their confidence still maintains its ground. In the 
manifest failure of their abilities, they take credit for their 
benevolence. When the revenue disappears in their hands, 
they have the presumption, in some of their late proceed- 
ings, to value themselves on the relief given to the people. 
They did not relieve the people. If they entertained such 
intentions, why did they order the obnoxious taxes to be 
paid? The people relieved themselves, in spite of the 
Assembly. 

But waiving all discussion on the parties who may claim 
the merit of this fallacious relief, has there been, in effect, 
any relief to the people in any form? M. Bailly, one of the 
grand agents of paper circulation, lets you into the nature of 
this relief. His speech to the National Assembly contained 
a high and laboured panegyric on the inhabitants of Paris, 
for the constancy and unbroken resolution with which they 
have borne their distress and misery. A fine picture of 
public felicity! What! great courage and unconquerable 
firmness of mind to endure benefits and sustain redress ? 
One would think, from the speech of this learned lord mayor, 
that the Parisians, for this twelvemonth past, had been suf- 
fering the straits of some dreadful blockade,—that Henry 
the Fourth had been stopping up the avenues to their 
supply, and Sully thundering with his ordnance at the 
gates of Paris,—when in reality they are besieged by no 
other enemies than their own madness and folly, their own 
credulity and perverseness. But M. Bailly will sooner thaw 
the eternal ice of his Atlantic regions than restore the cen- 
tral heat to Paris, whilst it remains ‘smitten with the cold, 
dry, petrific mace” of a false and unfeeling philosophy. 


606 BURKE 


Some time after this speech, that is, on the thirteenth of 
last August, the same magistrate, giving an account of his 
government at the bar of the same Assembly, expresses him- 
self as follows :—“ In the month of July, 1789,” (the period 
of everlasting commemoration,) “ the finances of the city of 
Paris were yet in good order; the expenditure was counter- 
balanced by the receipt, and she had at that time a million 
[forty thousand pounds sterling] in bank. The expenses 
which she has been constrained to incur, subsequent to the 
Revolution, amount to 2,500,000 livres. From these ex- 
penses, and the great falling off in the product of the free 
gifts, not only a momentary, but a total, want of money has 
taken place.” This is the Paris upon whose nourishment, 
in the course of the last year, such immense sums, drawn 
from the vitals of all France, have been expended. As long 
as Paris stands in the place of ancient Rome, so long she 
will be maintained by the subject provinces. It is an evil 
inevitably attendant on the dominion of sovereign demo- 
cratic republics. As it happened in Rome, it may survive 
that republican domination which gave rise to it. In that 
case despotism itself must submit to the vices of popularity. 
Rome, under her emperors, united the evils of both systems; 
and this unnatural combination was one great cause of her 
ruin. 

To tell the people that they are relieved by the dilapida- 
tion of their public estate is a cruel and insolent imposition. 
Statesmen, before they valued themselves on the relief given 
to the people by the destruction of their revenue, ought first 
to have carefully attended to the solution of this problem : 
—Whether it be more advantageous to the people to pay 
considerably and to gain in proportion, or to gain little or 
nothing and to be disburdened of all contribution? My 
mind is made up to decide in favour of the first proposition. 
Experience is with me, and, I believe, the best opinions also. 
To keep a balance between the power of acquisition on the 
part of the subject and the demands he is to answer on the 
part of the state is the fundamental part of the skill of atrue 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 607 


politician. The means of acquisition are prior in time and in 
arrangement. Good order is the foundation of all good things. 
To be enabled to acquire, the people, without being servile, 
must be tractable and obedient. The magistrate must have 
his reverence, the laws their authority. The body of the peo- 
ple must not find the principles of natural subordination by art 
rooted out of theirminds. They must respect that property 
of which they can not partake. They must labour to obtain 
what by labour can be obtained ; and when they find, as they 
commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavour, 
they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions 
of eternal justice. Of this consolation whoever deprivesthem 
deadens their industry, and strikes at the root of all acquisi- 
tion as of all conservation. He that does this is the cruel 
oppressor, the merciless enemy of the poor and wretched ; 
at the same time that by his wicked speculations he exposes 
the fruits of successful industry and the accumulations of for- 
tune to the plunder ofthe negligent, the disappointed, and 
the unprosperous. 

Too many of the financiers by profession are apt to see 
nothing in revenue but banks, and circulations, and annuities 
on lives, and tontines, and perpetual rents, and all the small 
wares of the shop. Ina settled order of the state, these 
things are not to be slighted, nor is the skill in them to be 
held of trivial estimation. They are good, but then only 
good when they assume the effects of that settled order, and 
are built upon it. But when men think that these beggarly 
contrivances may supply aresource for the evils which result 
from breaking up the foundations of public order, and from 
causing or suffering the principles of property to be subvert- 
ed, they will, in the. ruin of their country, leave a melancholy 
and lasting monument of the effect of preposterous politics, 
and presumptuous, short-sighted, narrow-minded wisdom. 

The effects of the incapacity shown by the popular leaders 
in all the great members of the commonwealth are to be 
covered with the “ all-atoning name” of Liberty. In some 
people I see great liberty, indeed ; in many, if not in the 


608 BURKE 


most, an oppressive, degrading servitude. But what is lib- 
erty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest 
of all possible evils ; for it isfolly, vice, and madness, without 
tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty 
iscan not bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on 
account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths. 
Grand, swelling sentiments of liberty I am sure I do not 
despise. They warm the heart ; they enlarge and liberalize 
our minds ; they animate our courage ina time of conflict. 
Old as I am, I read the fine raptures of Lucan and Corneille 
with pleasure. Neither do I wholly condemn the little arts 
and devices of popularity. They facilitate the carrying of 
many points of moment; they keep the people together ; 
they refresh the mind in its exertions ; and they diffuse oc- 
casional gayety over the severe brow of moral freedom. 
Every politician ought to sacrifice to the Graces, and to join 
compliance with reason. But in such an undertaking as that 
in France all these subsidiary sentiments and artifices are of 
little avail. To make a government requires no great pru- 
dence. Settle the seat of power, teach obedience, and the 
work is done. Togive freedom is still more easy. It is not 
necessary to guide ; it only requires to let go the rein. But 
to form a free government, that is, to temper together these 
opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent 
work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, 
powerful, and combining mind. ThisI do not find in those 
who take the lead in the National Assembly. Perhaps they 
are not so miserably deficient as they appear. I rather be- 
lieve it. It would put them below the common level of 
human understanding. But when the leaders choose to 
make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their 
talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. 
They will become flatterers instead of legislators,—the instru- 
ments, not the guides of the people. If any.of them should 
happen to propose a scheme of liberty soberly limited, and 
defined with proper qualifications, he will be immediately 
outbid by his competitors, who will produce something more 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 609 


splendidly popular. Suspicions will be raised of his fidelity 
to his cause. Moderation will be stigmatised as the virtue 
of cowards, and compromise as the prudence of traitors,— 
until, in hopes of preserving the credit which may enable 
him to temper and moderate on some occasions, the pop- 
ular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doc- 
trines and establishing powers that will afterwards defeat any 
sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed. 


But am I so unreasonable as to see nothing at all that de- 
serves commendation in the indefatigable labours of this As- 
sembly ? I donot deny, that, among an infinite number of 
acts of violence and folly, some good may have been done. 
They who destroy everything certainly will remove some 
grievance. They who make everything new have a chance 
that they may establish something beneficial. To give them 
credit for what they have done in virtue of the authority they 
have usurped, or to excuse them in the crimes by which that 
authority has been acquired, it must appear that the same 
things could not have been accomplished without producing 
such a revolution. Most assuredly they might ; because 
almost every one of the regulations made by them, which is 
not very equivocal, was either in the cession of the king, 
voluntarily made at the meeting of the States, or in the con- 
current instructions to the orders. Some usages have been 
abolished on just grounds ; but they were such, that, if they 
had stood as they were to all eternity, they would little de- 
tract from the happiness and prosperity of any state. The 
improvements of the National Assembly are superficial, their 
errors fundamental. 

Whatever they are, I wish my countrymen rather to re- 
commend to our neighbours the example of the British 
Constitution than to take models from them for the improve- 
ment of ourown. Inthe formerthey have got an invaluable 
treasure. They are not, I think, without some causes of 
apprehension and complaint ; but these they do not owe to 
their Constitution, but to their own conduct. I think our 

39 


610 BURKE 


happy situation owing to our Constitution,—but owing to 
the whole of it, and not to any part singly—owing in a great 
measure to what we have left standing in our several reviews 
and reformations, as well as to what we have altered or 
superadded. Our people will find employment enough for 
a truly patriotic, free, and independent spirit, in guarding 
what they possess from violation. I would not exclude al- 
teration neither; but even when I changed, it should be to 
preserve. I should be led to my remedy by a great griev- 
ance. In what I did, I should follow the example of our 
ancestors. I would make the reparation as nearly as possi- 
ble in the style of the building. A politic caution, aguarded 
circumspection, a moral rather than a complexional timidity, 
were among the ruling principles of our forefathers in their 
most decided conduct. Not being illuminated with the 
light of which the gentlemen of France tell us they have got 
so abundant a share, they acted under a strong impression 
of the ignorance and fallibility of mankind. He that had 
made them thus fallible rewarded them for having in their 
conduct attended to their nature. Let us imitate their cau- 
tion, if we wish to deserve their fortune or to retain their 
bequests. Let us add, if we please, but let us preserve what 
they have left; and standing on the firm ground of the 
British Constitution, let us be satisfied to admire, rather than 
attempt to follow in their desperate flights, the aéronauts of 
France. 

I have told you candidly my sentiments. I think they 
are not likely to alter yours. I do not know that they 
ought. You are young; you can not guide, but must follow, 
the fortune of your country. But hereafter they may be of 
some use to you, in some future form which your common. 
wealth may take. In the present it can hardly remain; but 
before its final settlement, it may be obliged to pass, as one 
of our poets says, “ through great varieties of untried being,” 
and in all its transmigrations to be purified by fire and blood. 

I have little to recommend my opinions but long observa- 
tion and much impartiality. They come from one who has 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 611 


been no tool of power, no flatterer of greatness, and who in 
his last acts does not wish to belie the tenor of his life. 
They come from one almost the whole of whose public exer- 
tion has been a struggle for the liberty of others,—from one 
in whose breast no anger durable or vehement has ever been 
kindled but by what he considered as tyranny, and who 
snatches from his share in the endeavours which are used 
by good men to discredit opulent oppression the hours he 
has employed on your affairs, and who in so doing persuades 
himself he has not departed from his usual office. They 
come from one who desires honours, distinctions, and emolu- 
ments but little, and who expects them not at all,—who has 
no contempt for fame, and no fear of obloquy,— who shuns 
contention, though he will hazard an opinion; from one who 
wishes to preserve consistency, but who would preserve con- 
sistency by varying his means to secure the unity of his end, 
—and, when the equipoise of the vessel in which he 
sails may beendangered by overloading it upon one side, is 
desirous of carrying the small weight of his reasons to that 
which may preserve its equipoise. 


NOTES 


1. Psalm, cxlix. 

2. “ Discourse on the Love of our Country,” Nov. 4, 1789, by Dr. Richard 
Price, 2d edition, p.17 and 18. 

3. “Those who dislike that mode of worship which is prescribed by public 
authority ought, if they can find no worship out of the Church which they ap- 
prove, to set up a separate worship for themselves ; and by doing this, and giv- 
ing an example of rational and manly worship, men of weight from their rank 
and literature may do the greatest service to society and the world.”—P. 18, 
Dr. Price’s Sermon. 

4. P. 34, “ Discourse on the Love of our Country,” by Dr. Price. 

5. Ist Mary, sess. 3, chap. I. 

6. “ That King James the Second, having endeavoured to subvert the Consti- 
tution of the kingdom, by breaking the original contract between king and 
people, and, by the advice of Jesuits and other wicked persons, having violated 
the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the kingdom, hath 
abdicated the government, and the throne is thereby vacant.” 

Fovk 22,y AR, QAG 

8 See Blackstone’s Magna Charta, printed at Oxford, 1759. 


612 BURKE 


9. William and Mary. 

10. Ecclesiasticus, chap. xxxviii. ver. 24, 25. ‘“ The wisdom of a learned man 
cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become 
wise. How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in 
the goad; that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labours, and whose talk is 
of bullocks ?” 

Ver. 27. “So every carpenter and workmaster, that laboureth night and 
day,” etc. 

Ver. 33. “ They shall not be sought for in public counsel, nor sit high in the 
congregation ; they shall not sit on the judge’s seat, nor understand the sen- 
tence of judgment: they can not declare justice and judgment, and they shall 
not be found where parables are spoken.” 

Ver. 34. “ But they will maintain the state of the world.” 

I do not determine whether this book be canonical, as the Gallican Church 
(till lately) has considered it, or apocryphal, as here it is taken. I am sure it 
contains a great deal of sense and truth. 

11, “ Discourse on the Love of our Country,” 3d edit., p. 39. 

12, Another of these reverend gentlemen, who was witness to some of the 
spectacles which Paris has lately exhibited, expresses himself thus :—“ A king 
dragged in submissive triumph by his conquering subjects is one of those ap- 
pearances of grandeur which seldom rise in the prospect of human affairs, and 
which, during the remainder of my life, I shall think of with wonder and grati- 
fication.” These gentlemen agree marvellously in their feelings. 

13. State Trials, Vol. II. p. 360, 363. 

14. October 6th, 1789. 15. “ Tous les Evéques a la lanterne! ” 

16, It is proper here to refer to a letter written upon this subject by an eye- 
witness. That eyewitness was one of the most honest, intelligent, and eloquent 
members of the National Assembly, one of the most active and zealous refor- 
mers of the state. He was obliged to secede from the Assembly ; and he after- 
wards became a voluntary exile, on account of the horrors of this pious triumph, 
and the dispositions of men, who, profiting of crimes, if not causing them, have 
taken the lead in public affairs. 


Extract of M. de Lally Tollendal’s Second Letter to a Friend. 


“ Parlons du parti que j’ai pris; il est bien justifié dans ma conscience.—Ni 
cette ville coupable, ni cette assemblée plus coupable encore, ne méritoient 
que je me justifie ; mais j’ai 4 coeur que vous, et les personnes qui pensent com- 
me vous, ne me condamnent pas.—Ma santé, je vous jure, me rendoit mes 
fonctions impossibles; mais méme en les mettant de cété il a été au-dessus de 
mes forces de supporter plus longtems l’horreur que me causoit ce sang,—ces 
tétes,—cette reine presque égorgée,—ce roi, amené esclave, entrant a Paris au 
milieu de ses assassins, et précédé des tétes de ses malheureux gardes,—ces 
perfides janissaires, ces assassins, ces femmes cannibales,—-ce cri de TOUS LES 
EVEQUES A LA LANTERNE, dans le moment ot le roi entre sa capitale avec deux 
évéques de son conseil dans sa voiture—un coup de fusil, que j’ai vu tirer dans 
un des carrosses de la reine,—M. Bailly appellant cela un beau jour,—l’assem- 
blée ayant déclaré froidement le matin, qu’il n’étoit pas de sa dignité d’aller 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 613 


toute entiére environner le roi,—M. Mirabeau disant impunément dans cette 
assemblée, que le vaisseau de 1’état, loin d’étre arrété dans sa course, s’élanceroit 
avec plus de rapidité que jamais vers sa régénération,—M. Barnave, riant avec 
lui, quand des flots de sang couloient autour de nous,—le vertueux Mounier * 
échappant par miracle 4 vingt assassins, qui avoient voulu faire de sa téte un 
trophée de plus: Voila ce qui me fit jurer de ne plus mettre le pied dans cette 
caverne d’Antropophages [the National Assembly], ott je n’avois plus de force 
d’élever la voix, ot depuis six semaines je l’avois élevée en vain. 

“Moi, Mounier, et tous les honnétes gens, ont pensé que le dernier effort a 
faire pour le bien étoit d’en sortir. Aucune idée de crainte ne s’est approchée 
de moi. Je rougirois de m’en défendre. J’avois encore regi sur la route de 
la part de ce peuple, moins coupable que ceux qui l’ont enivré de fureur des 
acclamations, et des applaudissements, dont d’autres auroient été flattés, et qui 
m’ont fait frémir. C’est 4 l’indignation, c’est 4 Vhorreur, c’est aux convulsions 
physiques, que le seul aspect du sang me fait éprouver que j’aicédé. On brave 
une seule mort; on la brave plusieurs fois, quand elle peut étre utile. Mais 
aucune puissance sous le ciel, mais aucune opinion publique ou privée n’ont le 
droit de me condamner 4 souffrir inutilement mille supplices par minute, et a 
périr de désespoir, de rage, au milieu des triomphes, du crime que je n’ai pu 
arréter. Ils me proscriront, ils confisqueront mes biens. Je labourerai la terre, 
et je ne les verrai plus. Voila ma justification. Vous pourrez la lire, la mon- 
trer, la laisser copier; tant pis pour ceux qui ne la comprendront pas; ce ne sera 
alors moi qui auroit eu tort de la leur donner.” 

This military man had not so good nerves as the peaceable gentlemen of the 
Old Jewry.—See Mons. Mounier’s narrative of these transactions : a man also 
of honour and virtue and talents, and therefore a fugitive. 

17. See the fate of Bailly and Condorcet, supposed to be here particularly 
alluded to. Compare the circumstances of the trial and execution of the for- 
mer with this prediction. 

18. The English are, I conceive, misrepresented in a letter Peel in one of 
the papers, by a gentlemen thought to be a Dissenting minister. When writ- 
ing to Dr. Price of the spirit which prevails at Paris, he says,—“ The spirit of 
the people in this place has abolished all the proud distinctions which the king 
and nobles had usurped in their minds: whether they talk of the king, the 
noble, or the priest, their whole language is that of the most enlightened and 
liberal amongst the English.” If this gentheman means to confine the terms 
enlightened and liberal to one set of men in England, it may be true. Itis not 
generally so. 

1g. Sit igitur hoc ab initio persuasum civibus, dominos esse omnium rerum ac 
moderatores deos; eaque, que gerantur, eorum geri vi, ditione, ac numine; 
eosdemque optime de genere hominum mereri; et qualis quisque sit, quid 
agat, quid in se admittat, qua mente, qua pietate colat religiones intueri: pio- 
rum et impiorum habere rationem. His enim rebus imbutz mentes haud sane 
abhorrebunt ab utili et a vera sententia.—Cic. de Legibus, 1. 2. 

20. Quicquid multis peccatur inultum. 


* N. B. M. Mounier was then speaker of the National Assembly. He has since been obliged 
to live in exile, though one of the firmest assertors of liberty. 


614 BURKE 


21. This (down to the end of the first sentence in the next paragraph) and some 
other parts, here and there, were inserted, on his reading the manuscript, by my 
lost son. 

22. I do not choose to shock the feelings of the moral reader with any quota- 
tion of their vulgar, base, and profane language. 

23. Their connection with Turgot and almost all the people of the finance. 

24. All have been confiscated in their turn. 

25. Not his brother, nor any near relation; but this mistake does not affect 
the argument. 

26. The rest of the passage is this :-— 

“ Who, having spent the treasures of his crown, 
Condemns their luxury to feed his own. 
And yet this act, to varnish o’er the shame 
Of sacrilege, must bear Devotion’s name. 
No crime so bold, but would be understood 
A real, or at least a seeming good. 
Who fears not to do ill, yet fears the name, 
And free from conscience, is a slave to fame. 
Thus he the Church at once protects and spoils: 
But princes’ swords are sharper than their styles. 
And thus to th’ ages past he makes amends, 
Their charity destroys, their faith defends. 
Then did Religion in a lazy cell, 
In empty, airy contemplations, dwell ; 
And like the block, unmoved lay: but ours; 
As much too active, like the stork devours. 
Is there no temperate region can be known 
Betwixt their frigid and our torrid zone? 
Could we not wake from that lethargic dream, 
But to be restless in a worse extreme? 
And for that lethargy was there no cure, 
But to be cast into a calenture ? 
Can knowledge have no bound, but must advance 
So far, to make us wish for ignorance, 
And rather in the dark to grope our way, 
Than, led by a false guide, to err by day? 
Who sees these dismal heaps, but would demand 
What barbarous invader sack’d the land ? 
But when he hears no Goth, no Turk did bring 
This desolation, but a Christian king, 
When nothing but the name of zeal appears 
*Twixt our best actions and the worst of theirs, 
What does he think our sacrilege would spare, 
When such th’ effects of our devotions are ?” 

Cooper's Hill, by Sir JOHN DENHAM. 

27. Rapport de Mons. le Directeur-Général des Finances, fait par Ordre du 

Roi 2 Versailles. Mai 5, 1789 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 615 


28. In the Constitution of Scotland, during the Stuart reigns, a committee sat 
for preparing bills; and none could pass, but those previously approved by 
them. This committee was called Lords of Articles. 

29. When I wrote this I quoted from memory, after many years had elapsed 
from my reading the passage. A learned friend has found it and it is as fol- 
lows :— 

“ The ethical character is the same: both exercise despotism over the bet- 
ter class of citizens ; and decrees are in the one what ordinance and arréts are 
in the other : the demagogue, too, and the court favourite, are not unfrequently 
the same identical men, and always bear a close analogy ; and these have the 
principal power, each in their respective forms of government, favourites with 
the absolute monarch, and demagogues with a people such asI have de- 
scribed.” — Arist. Politic. lib. iv. cap. 4. 

30. “De l’Adminstration des Finances de la France,” par Mons. Necker 
Vol. I. p. 288 

31. “ De l’Administration des Finances de la France,” par M. Necker. 

32. Vol. III., chap. 8 and chap. 9. 

33- The world is obliged to M. de Calonne for the pains he has taken to refute 
the scandalous exaggerations relative to some of the royal expenses, and to 
detect the fallacious account given of pensions for the wicked purpose of pro- 
voking the populace to all sorts of crimes. 

34. See Gulliver’s Travels for the idea of countries governed by philosophers. 

35. M.de Calonne states the falling off of the population of Paris as far more 
considerable ; and it may be so, since the period of M. Necker’s calculation. 


36. Travaux de charité pour sub- 


venir au manque de travail a Livres. oe s. ad 
Paris et dans les provinces . 3,866,920 161,12I 13 4 
Destruction de vagabondage et de la 
mendicité . ‘ : ; 2,071,417 60,642 7 6 
Primes pour l’importation de grains 5,671,907 230,329 9 2 


Dépenses relatives aux subsistances, 
déduction fait des recouvrements 


qui ont eulieu . ? ; - 39,871,790 1,661,324 11 8 
Total . R : » 51,082,034 2,128,418 1 8 


When I sent this book to the press, I entertained some doubt concerning 
the nature and extent of the last article in the above accounts, which is only 
under a general head, without any detail. Since then I have seen M. de 
Calonne’s works. I must think it a great loss to me that I had not that advan- 
tage earlier. M. de Calonne thinks this article to be on account of general sub- 
sistence ; but as he is not able to comprehend how so great a loss as upwards of 
1,661,000/. sterling could be sustained on the difference between the price and 
the sale of grain, he seems to attribute this enormous head of charge to secret 
expenses of the Revolution. I can not say anything positively on that subject. 
The reader is capable of judging, by the aggregate of these immense charges, on 
the state and condition of France, and the system of public economy adopted in 


616 BURKE 


that nation. These articles of account produced no inquiry or discussion in 
the National Assembly. 

37. This is on a supposition of the truth of this story ; but he was not in 
France at the time. One name serves as well as another. 

38. Domat. 

39. Speech of M. Camus, pnblished by order of the National Assembly. 

— System und Folgen des Illuminatenordens.” Miinchen, 1787. 

40. Whether the following description is strictly true I know not; but it is 
what the publishers would have pass for true, in order to animate others. In 
a letter from Toul, given in one of their papers, is the following passage con- 
cerning the people of that district:—- “ Dans la Révolution actuelle, ils ont 
résisté a toutes les séductions du bigotisme, aux persécutions et aux tracas- 
series des ennemis de la Révolution. Oubliant leurs plus grands intéréts pour 
rendre hommage aux vues d’ordre général qui ont déterminé l’Assemblée Na- 
tionale, ils voient, sans se plaindre, supprimer cette foule d’établissemens ecclési- 
astiques par lesquels ils subsistoient ; et méme, en perdant leur siége épiscopal, 
la seule de toutes ces ressources qui pouvoit, ou plutdt qui devoit, en toute 
équité, leur étre conservée, condamnés, 4 la plus effrayante misére sans avoir 
été ni pu étre entendus, ils ne murmurent point, ils restent fideles aux principes 
du plus pur patriotisme ; ils sont encore préts 4 verser leur sang pour le main- 
tien de la constitution, qui va réduire leur ville 4 la plus déplorable nullité.”— 
These people are not supposed to have endured those sufferings and injustices 
in a struggle for liberty, for the same account states truly that they have been 
always free; their patience in beggary and ruin, and their suffering, without 
remonstrance, the most flagrant and confessed injustice, if strictly true, can be 
nothing but the effect of this dire fanaticism. A great multitude all over 
France is in the same condition and the same temper. 

41. See the proceedings of the confederation at Nantes. 

42. “ Siplures sunt ii quibus improbe datum est,quam illi quibus injuste ademp- 
tum est, idcirco plus etiam valent? Non enim numero hec judicantur, sed 
pondere. Quam autem habet zquitatem, ut agrum multis annis, aut etiam 
seculis ante possessum, qui nullum habuit habeat, qui autem habuit amittat ? 
Ac, propter hoc injuriz genus, Lacedaemonii Lysandrum Ephorum expulerunt ; 
Agin regem (quod nunquam antea apud eos acciderat) necaverunt; exque eo 
tempore tantz discordiz secutz sunt, ut et tyranni exsisterent, et optimates 
exterminarentur, et preclarissime constituta respublica dilaberetur. Nec vero 
solum ipsa cecidit, sed etiam reliquam Greciam evertit contagionibus malorum, 
que a Lacedzmoniis profectze manarunt latius.”—After speaking of the con- 
duct of the model of true patriots, Aratus of Sicyon, which was in a very differ- 
ent spirit, he says,—Sic par est agere cum civibus; non (ut bis jam vidimus) 
hastam in foro ponere et bona civium voci subjicere przeconis. At ille Grzcus 
(id quod fuit sapientis et przstantis viri) omnibus consulendum esse putavit : 
eaque est summa ratio et sapientia boni civis, commoda civium non divellere, 
sed omnes eadem zquitate continere.”—Cic. Off, 1. 2. 

43. See two books entitled, “ Einige Originalschriften des I]uminatenordens,’ 

44. A leading member of the Assembly, M. Rabaut de St. Etienne, has ex- 
pressed the principle of all their proceedings as clearly as possible; nothing 


REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 617 


can be more simple :—“ Tous les établissemens en France couronnent le mal- 
heur du peuple: pour le rendre heureux, il faut le renouveler, changer ses 
idées, changer ses loix, changer ses meeurs, . .. . changer les hommes, changer 
les choses, changer les mots, . . . . toute détruire; oui, tout détruire; puisque 
tout est 4 récréer.”—This gentleman was chosen president in an assembly not 
sitting at Quinze-Vingt or the Petites Maisons, and composed of persons giving 
themselves out to be rational beings ; but neither his ideas, language, or conduct 
differ in the smallest degree from the discourses, opinions, and actions of those, 
within and without the Assembly, who direct the operations of the machine 
now at work in France. 

45. The Assembly, in executing the plan of their committee, made some alter- 
ations. They have struck out one stage in these gradations; this removes a 
part of the obejction; but the main objection, namely, that in their scheme the 
first constituent voter has no connection with the representative legislator, 
remains in all its force. There are other alterations, some possibly for the 
better, some certainly for the worse: but to the author the merit or demerit of 
these smaller alterations appears to be of no moment, where the scheme itself 
is fundamentally vicious and absurd. 

46. “‘ Non, ut olim, universe legiones deducebantur, cum tribunis, et centuri- 
onibus, et sui cujusque ordinis militibus, ut consensu et caritate rempublicam 
efficerent ; sed ignoti inter se, diversis manipulis, sine rectore, sine affectibus 
mutuis, quasi ex alio genere mortalium repente in unum collecti, numerus magis 
quam colonia.”——Tac. Annal, lib. 14, sect. 27.—All this will be still more ap- 
plicable to the unconnected, rotatory, biennial national assemblies, in this absurd 
and senseless constitution. 

47. Qualitas, Relatio, Actio, Passio, Ubi, Quando, Situs, Habitus. 

48. See l’Etat de la France, p. 363. 

49. In reality three to reckon the provincial republican establishments. 

50. For further elucidations upon the subject of all these judicatures, and of 
the Committee of Research, see M. de Calonne’s work. 

51. “ Comme sa Majesté y a reconnu, non un systéme d’associations particuli- 
éres, mais une réunion de volontés de tous les Francois pour la liberté et la 
prospérité communes, ainsi pour le maintien de l’ordre publique, il a pensé 
qu’il convenoit que chaque régiment prit part 4 ces fétes civiques pour multi- 
plier les rapports, et resserrer les liens d’union entre les troupes.”—Lest I should 
not be credited, I insert the words authorizing the troops to feast with the 
popular confederacies. 

52. This war minister has since quitted the school and resigned his office. 

53- Courrier Francois, July 30, 1790. Assemblée Nationale, Numero 2r1o. 

54. I see by M. Necker’s account, that the national guards of Paris have re- 
ceived, over and above the money levied within their own city, about 145,000/. 
Sterling out of the public treasure. Whether this be an actual payment for 
the nine months of their existence, or an estimate of their yearly charge, I do 
not clearly perceive. It is of no great importance, as certainly they may take 
whatever they please. 

55- The reader will observe that I have but lightly touched (my plan demanded 
nothing more) on the condition of the French finances as connected with the 


618 BURKE 


demands upon them. If I had intended to do otherwise, the materials in my 
hands for such a task are not altogether perfect. On this subject I refer the 
reader to M. de Calonne’s work, and the tremendous display that he has made 
of the havoc and devastation in the public estate, and in all the affairs of 
France, caused by the presumptuous good intentions of ignorance and incapa- 
city. Such effects those causes will always produce. Looking over that ac- 
count with a pretty strict eye, and, with perhaps too much rigour, deducting 
everything which may be placed to the account of a financier out of place, who 
might be supposed by his enemies desirous of making the most of his cause, I 
believe it will be found that a more salutary lesson of caution against the daring 
spirit of innovators than what has been supplied at the expense of France 
never was at any time furnished to mankind. 

56. La Bruyere of Bossuet. 

57. “Ce n’est point a l’assemblée entiere que je m’addresse ici; je ne parle 
qu’a ceux qui l’égarent, en lui cachant sous des gazes séduisantes le but ot ils 
Ventrainent. C’est 4 eux que je dis: Votre objet, vous n’en disconviendrez 
pas, c’est d’6ter tout espoir au clergé, et de consommer sa ruine; c’est-la, en 
ne vous soupconnant d’aucune combinaison de cupidité, d’aucun regard sur le 
jeu des effets publics, c’est-la ce qu’on doit croire que vous avez en vue dans la 
terrible opération que vous proposez; c’est ce qui doit en étre le fruit. Mais 
le peuple qui vous y intéressez, quel avantage peut-il y trouver? En vous ser- 
vant sans cesse de lui, que faites-vous pour lui? Rien, absolument rien; et, 
au contraire, vous faites ce qui ne conduit qu’a "laccabler de nouvelles charges, 
Vous avez rejeté, 4 son préjudice, une offre de 400 millions, dont l’acceptation 
pouvoit devenir un moyen de soulagement en sa faveur ; et a cette resource, aussi 
profitable que légitime, vous avez substitué une injustice ruineuse, qui, de votre 
proper aveu, charge le trésor public, et par conséquent le peuple, d’un surcroit 
de dépense annuelle de 50 millions au moins, et d’un remboursement de 150 
millions. 

“ Malheureux peuple! voila ce que vous vaut en dernier résultat l’expropria- 
tion de l’Eglise, et la dureté des décrets taxateurs du traitement des ministres 
d’une religion bienfaisante ; et désormais ils seront 4 votre charge: leurs charités 
soulageoient les pauvres ; et vous allez étre imposés pour subvenir a leur entre- 
tien! "—De ?’ Etat de la France, p. 81. See also p. 92, and the following pages. 


A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 


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A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 


(On the attacks made upon Mr. Burke and his pension, in the House of Lords, 
by the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, 1796.) 


Y LORD,—I could hardly flatter myself with the hope 

that so very early in the season I should have to ac- 

knowledge obligations to the Duke of Bedford and to the 

Earl of Lauderdale. These noble persons have lost no time 

in conferring upon me that sort of honour which it is alone 

within their competence, and which it is certainly most con- 
genial to their nature and their manners, to bestow. 

To be ill spoken of, in whatever language they speak, by 
the zealots of the new sect in philosophy and politics, of 
which these noble persons think so charitably, and of which 
others think so justly, to me is no matter of uneasiness or 
surprise. To have incurred the displeasure of the Duke of 
Orleans or the Duke of Bedford, to fall under the censure 
of Citizen Brissot or of his friend the Earl of Lauderdale, I 
ought to consider as proofs, not the least satisfactory, that 
I have produced some part of the effect I proposed by my en- 
deavours. I have laboured hard to earn what the noble Lords 
are generous enough to pay. Personal offence I have given 
them none. The parts they take against me is from zeal to the 
cause. Itis well,—it is perfectly well. I have to do homage 
to their justice. I have tothank the Bedfords and the 
Lauderdales for having so faithfully and so fully acquitted 
towards me whatever arrear of debt was left undischarged 
by the Priestleys and the Paines. 


Some, perhaps, may think them executors in their own 
621 


622 BURKE 


wrong: I at least have nothing to complain of. They have 
gone beyondthe demands of justice. They have been (a 
little, perhaps, beyond their intention) favourable to me. 
They have been the means of bringing out by their invec- 
tives the handsome things which Lord Grenville has had the 
goodness and condescension to say in my behalf. Retired 
as lam from the world, and from all its affairs and all its 
pleasures, I confess it does kindle in my nearly extinguished 
feelings a very vivid satisfaction to be so attacked and so 
commended. It is soothing tomy wounded mind to be com- 
mended by an able, vigorous, and well-informed states- 
man, and at the very moment when he stands forth, with a 
manliness and resolution worthy of himself and of his cause, 
for the preservation of the person and government of our 
sovereign, and therein for the security of the laws, the 
liberties, the morals, and the lives of his people. To be in 
any fair way connected with such things is indeed a distinc- 
tion. No philosophy can make me above it: no melancholy 
can depress me so low as to make me wholly insensible to 
such an honour. 

Why will they not let me remain in obscurity and inaction ? 
Are they apprehensive, that, if an atom of me remains, the 
sect has something to fear ? Must I be annihilated, lest, like 
old John Zisca’s, my skin might be made into a drum, to 
animate Europe to eternal battle against a tyranny that 
threatens to overwhelm all. Europe and all the human 
race P 

My Lord, it is a subject of awful meditation. Before this 
of France, the annals of all time have not furnished an 
instance of a complete revolution. That revolution seems to 
have extended even to the constitution of the mind of man. 
It has this of wonderful in it, that it resembles what Lord 
Verulam says of the operations of Nature: It was perfect, 
not only in its elements and principles, but in all its mem- 
bers and its organs, from the very beginning. The moral 
scheme of France furnishes the only pattern ever known 
which they who admire will instantly resemble. It is, indeed 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 623 


an inexhaustible repertory of one kind of examples. In my 
wretched condition, though hardly to be classed with the 
living, Iam not safe from them. They have tigers to fall 
upon animated strength; they have hyenas to prey upon 
carcasses. The national menagerie is collected by the first 
physiologists of the time; and it is defective in no descrip- 
tion of savage nature. They pursue even suchas me into the 
obscurest retreats, and haul them before their revolutionary 
tribunals. Neither sex, nor age, nor the sanctuary of the 
tomb, is sacred to them. They have so determined a hatred 
to all privileged orders, that they deny even to the departed 
the sad immunities of the grave. They are not wholly 
without an object. The turpitude purveys to their malice ; 
and they unplumb the dead for bullets to assassinate the 
living. If all revolutionists were not proof against all cau- 
tion, I should recommend it to their consideration, that no 
persons were ever known in history, either sacred or profane, 
to vex the sepulchre, and by their sorceries to call up the 
prophetic dead, with any other event than the prediction of 
their own disastrous fate.—‘‘ Leave me, oh, leave me to 
repose!” 

In one thing I can excuse the Duke of Bedford for his 
attack upon me and my mortuary pension: He cannot 
readily comprehend the transaction he condemns. What I 
have obtained was the fruit of no bargain, the production of 
no intrigue, the result of no compromise, the effect of no so- 
licitation. The first suggestion of it never came from me, 
mediately or immediately, to his Majesty or any of his 
ministers. It was long known that the instant my en- 
gagements would permit it, and before the heaviest of all 
calamities had forever condemned me to obscurity and sor- 
row, I had resolved on a total retreat. I had executed that 
design. I was entirely out of the way of serving or of hurt- 
ing any statesman or any party, when the ministers so 
generously and so nobly carried into effect the spontaneous 
bounty of the crown. Both descriptions have acted as 
became them. When I could no longer serve them, the 


624 BURKE 


ministers have considered my situation. When I could 
no longer hurt them, the revolutionists have trampled on my 
infirmity. My gratitude, I trust, is equal to the manner in 
which the benefit was conferred. It came to me, indeed, at 
a time of life, and in a state of mind and body, in which no 
circumstance of fortune could afford me any real pleasure. 
But this was no fault in the royal donor, or in his ministers, 
who were pleased, in acknowledging the merits of an invalid 
servant of the public, to assuage the sorrows of a desolate 
old man. 

It would ill become meto boast of anything. It would as 
ill become me, thus called upon, to depreciate the value ofa 
long life spent with unexampled toil in the service of my 
country. Since the total body of my services, on account 
of the industry which was shown in them, and the fairness of 
my intentions, have obtained the acceptance of my sovereign, 
it would be absurd in me to range myself on the side of the 
Duke of Bedford and the Corresponding Society, or, as far 
asin me lies, to permit a dispute on the rate at which the 
authority appointed by our Constitution to estimate such 
things has been pleased to set them. 

Loose libels ought to be passed by in silence and con- 
tempt. By me they have been so always. I knew, that, 
as long as I remained in public, I should live down the 
calumnies of malice and the judgments of ignorance. If I 
happened to be now and then in the wrong, (as who is not ?) 
like all other men, I must bear the consequence, of my faults 
and my mistakes. The libels of the present day are just of 
the same stuff as the libels of the past. But they derive an 
importance from the rank of the persons they come from, 
and the gravity of the place where they were uttered. In 
some way or other I ought to take some notice of them. 
To assert myself thus traduced is not vanity or arrogance. 
It is a demand of justice; it is ademonstration of gratitude. 
If Iam unworthy, the ministers are worse than prodigal. 
On that hypothesis, I perfectly agree with the Duke of 
Bedford. | 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 625 


For whatever I have been(I am now no more) I put my- 
self on my country. I ought to be allowed a reasonable 
freedom, because I stand upon my deliverance; and no 
culprit ought to pleadin irons. Even in the utmost latitude 
of defensive liberty, I wish to preserve all possible decorum. 
Whatever it may be in the eyes of these noble persons them- 
selves, to me their situation calls for the most profound 
respect. If I should happen to trespass a little, which I 
trust I shall not, let it always be supposed that a confusion of 
characters may produce mistakes,—that,in the masquerades 
of the grand carnival of our age, whimsical adventures 
happen, odd things are said and pass off. If I should fail a 
single point in the high respect I owe to those illustrious 
persons, I can not be supposed to mean the Duke of Bed- 
ford and the Earl of Lauderdale of the House of Peers, but 
the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale of Palace 
Yard,—the Dukes and Earls of Brentford. There they are 
on the pavement; there they seem to come nearer to my 
humble level, and, virtually at least, to have waived their 
high privilege. 

Making this protestation, I refuse all revolutionary 
tribunals, where men have been put to death for no other 
reason than that they had obtained favours from the 
crown. I claim, not the letter, but the spirit of the old 
English law,—that is, to be tried by my peers. I decline 
his Grace’s jurisdiction as a judge. I challenge the Duke 
of Bedford as a juror to pass upon the value of my services. 
Whatever his natural parts may be, I can not recognize in 
his few and idle years the competence to judge of my long 
and laborious life. If I can help it, he shall not be on the 
inquest of my quantum meruit. Poor rich man! he can 
hardly know anything of public industry in its exertions, or 
can estimate its compensations when its work is done. I 
have no doubt of his Grace’s readiness in all the calculations 
of vulgar arithmetic ; but I shrewdly suspect that he is little 
studied in the theory of moral proportions, and has never 


learned the rule of three in the arithmetic of policy and state. 
40 


626 BURKE 


His Grace thinks I have obtained too much. I answer, 
that my exertions, whatever they have been, were such as 
no hopes of pecuniary reward could possibly excite ; and no 
pecuniary compensation can possibly reward them.  Be- 
tween money and such services, if done by abler men than 
I am, there is no common principle of comparison: they 
are quantities incommensurable. Money is made for the 
comfort and convenience of animal life. It cannot be a 
reward for what mere animal life must, indeed, sustain, but 
never can inspire. With submission to his Grace, I have not 
had more than sufficient. As to any noble use, I trust I 
know how to employ as well as he a much greater fortune 
than he possesses. In a more confined application, I cer- 
tainly stand in need of every kind of relief and easement 
much more than he does. When I say I have not received 
more than I deserve, is this the language I hold to Majesty ? 
No! Far, very far, from it! Before that presence I claim 
no merit at all. Everything towards me is favour and bounty. 
One style to a gracious benefactor; another to a proud and 
insulting foe. 

His Grace is pleased to aggravate my guilt by charging 
my acceptance of his Majesty’s grant as a departure from my 
ideas and the spirit of my conduct with regard to economy. 
If it be, my ideas of economy were false and ill-founded. 
But they are the Duke of Bedford’s ideas of economy I have 
contradicted, and not my own. If he means to allude to 
certain bills brought in by me on a message from the throne 
in 1782, I tell him that there is nothing in my conduct that 
can contradict either the letter or the spirit of those acts. 
Does he mean the Pay-Office Act? I take it for granted he 
does not. The act to which he alludes is, I suppose, the 
Establishment Act. I greatly doubt whether his Grace has 
ever read the one or the other. The first of these systems 
cost me, with every assistance which my then situation gave 
me, pains incredible. I found an opinion common through 
all the offices, and general in the public at large, that it 
would prove impossible to reform and methodize the office 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 627 


of paymaster-general. I undertook it, however; and I suc- 
ceeded in my undertaking. Whether the military service, 
or whether the general economy of our finances have profited 
by that act, I leave to those who are acquainted with the 
army and with the treasury to judge. 

An opinion full as general prevailed also, at the same time, 
that nothing could be done for the regulation of the civil 
list establishment. The very attempt to introduce method 
into it, and any limitations to its services, was held absurd. 
I had not seen the man who so much as suggested one 
economical principle or an economical expedient upon that 
subject. Nothing but coarse amputation or coarser taxation 
were then talked of, both of them without design, combina- 
tion, or the least shadow of principle. Blind and headlong 
zeal or factious fury were the whole contribution brought 
by the most noisy, on that occasion, towards the satisfaction 
of the public or the relief of the crown. 

Let me tell my youthful censor, that the necessities of 
that time required something very different from what others 
then suggested or what his Grace now conceives. Let me 
inform him, that it was one of the most critical periods in 
our annals. 

Astronomers have supposed, that, if a certain comet, 
whose path intersected the ecliptic, had met the earth in 
some (I forget what) sign, it would have whirled us along 
with it, in its eccentric course, into God knows what regions 
of heat and cold. Had the portentous comet of the Rights 
of Man, (which “from its horrid hair shakes pestilence and 
war,” and “with fear of change perplexes monarchs,”) had 
that comet crossed upon usin that internal state of England, 
nothing human could have prevented our being irresistibly 
hurried out of the highway of heaven into all the vices, 
crimes, horrors, and miseries of the French Revolution. 

Happily, France was not then Jacobinized. Her hostility 
was at a good distance. We had a limb cut off, but we pre- 
served the body: we lost our colonies, but we kept our Con- 
stitution. There was, indeed, much intestine heat; there 


628 BURKE 


was a dreadful fermentation. Wild and savage insurrection 
quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the 
name of Reform. Such was the distemper of the public 
mind, that there was no madman, in his maddest ideas and 
maddest projects, who might not count upon numbers to 
support his principles and execute his designs. 

Many of the changes, by a great misnomer called Parlia- 
mentary Reforms, went, not in the intention of all the pro- 
fessors and supporters of them, undoubtedly, but went in 
their certain, and, in my opinion, not very remote effect, 
home to the utter destruction of the Constitution of this 
kingdom. Had they taken place, not France, but England, 
would have had the honour of leading up the death-dance of 
democratic revolution. Other projects, exactly coincident 
in time with those, struck at the very existence of the king- 
dom under any Constitution. There are who remember the 
blind fury of some and the lamentable helplessness of others ; 
here, a torpid confusion, from a panic fear of the danger,— 
there, the same inaction, from a stupid insensibility to it; 
here, well-wishers to the mischief,—there, indifferent lookers- 
on. At the same time, a sort of National Convention, du- 
bious in its nature and perilous in its example, nosed Parlia- 
ment in the very seat of its authority,—sat with a sort of 
superintendence over it,-—and little less than dictated to it, 
not only laws, but the very form and essence of legislature 
itself. In Ireland things ran in a still more eccentric course. 
Government was unnerved, confounded, and in a manner 
suspended. Its equipoise was totally gone. I do not mean 
to speak disrespectfully of Lord North. He was a man of 
admirable parts, of general knowledge, of a versatile under- 
standing fitted for every sort of business, of infinite wit and 
pleasantry, of a delightful temper, and with a mind most 
perfectly disinterested. But it would be only to degrade 
myself by a weak adulation, and not to honour the memory 
of a great man, to deny that he wanted something of the 
vigilance and spirit of command that the time required. 
Indeed, a darkness next to the fog of this awful day lowered 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 629 


over the whole region. Fora little time the helm appeared 
abandoned. 


“ Ipse diem noctemque negat discernere ccelo, 
Nec meminisse viz media Palinurus in unda,” 


At that time I was connected with men of high place in 
the community. They loved liberty as much as the Duke 
of Bedford can do; and they understood it at least as well. 
Perhaps their politics, as usual, took a tincture from their 
character, and they cultivated what they loved. The liberty 
they pursued was a liberty inseparable from order, from virtue, 
from morals, and from religion,—and was neither hypocriti- 
cally nor fanatically followed. They did not wish that liberty, 
in itself one of the first of blessings, should in its perversion 
become the greatest curse which could fall upon mankind. 
To preserve the Constitution entire, and practically equal to 
all the great ends of its formation, not in one single part, 
but in all its parts, was to them the first object. Popularity 
and power they regarded alike. These were with them only 
different means of obtaining that object, and had no pre- 
ference over each other in their minds, but as one or the other 
might afford asurer ora less certain prospect of arriving at that 
end. It is some. consolation to me, in the cheerless gloom 
which darkens the evening of my life, that with them I com- 
menced my political career, and never for a moment, in 
reality nor in appearance, for any length of time, was sepa- 
rated from their good wishes and good opinion. 

But what accident it matters not, nor upon what desert, 
but just then, and in the midst of that hunt of obloquy 
which ever has pursued me with a full cry through life, I 
had obtained a very considerable degree of public confidence. 
I know well enough how equivocal a test this kind of pop- 
ular opinion forms of the merit that obtained it. I am no 
stranger to the insecurity of its tenure. Ido not boast of 
it. It is mentioned to show, not how highly I prize the 
thing, but my right to value the use I made of it. I en- 
deavored to turn that short-lived advantage to myself into a 


630 BURKE 


permanent benefit to my country. Far am I from detract- 
ing from the merit of some gentlemen, out of office or in it, 
on that occasion. No! It is not my way to refuse a full 
and heaped measure of justice to the aids that I receive. I 
have through life been willing to give everything to others, 
—and to reserve nothing for myself, but the inward con- 
science that I had omitted no pains to discover, to animate, 
to discipline, to direct the abilities of the country for its 
service, and to place them in the best light to improve their 
age, or to adorn it. This conscience I have. I have never 
suppressed any man, never checked him for a moment in his 
course, by any jealousy, or by any policy. I was always 
ready, to the height of my means, (and they were always in- 
finitely below my desires,) to forward those abilities which 
overpowered my own. He is an ill-furnished undertaker 
who has no machinery but his own hands to work with. 
Poor in my own faculties, I ever thought myself rich in 
theirs. In that period of difficulty and danger, more espe- 
cially, I consulted and sincerely co-operated with men of all 
parties who seemed disposed to the same ends, or to any main 
part of them. Nothing to prevent disorder was omitted: 
when it appeared, nothing to subdue it was left uncounselled 
nor unexecuted, as far as I could prevail. At the time I 
speak of, and having a momentary lead, so aided and so en- 
couraged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand—I 
do not say I saved my country ; I am sure I did my country 
important service. There were few, indeed, that did not at 
that time acknowledge it,—and that time was thirteen years 
ago. It was but one voice, that no man in the kingdom bet- 
ter deserved an honourable provision should be made for 
him. 

So much for my general conduct through the whole of 
the portentous crisis from 1780 to 1782, and the general 
sense then entertained of that conduct by my country. But 
my character as a reformer, in the particular instances which 
the Duke of Bedford refers to, is so connected in principle 
with my opinions on the hideous changes which have since 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 631 


barbarized France, and, spreading thence, threaten the 
political and moral order of the whole world, that it seems 
to demand something of a more detailed discussion. 

My economical reforms were not, as his Grace may think, 
the suppression of a paltry pension or employment, more or 
less. Economy in my plans was, as it ought to be, secondary, 
subordinate, instrumental. I acted on state principles. I 
found a great distemper in the commonwealth, and accord- 
ing to the nature of the evil and of the object I treated it. 
The malady was deep; it was complicated, in the causes and in 
the symptoms. Throughout it was full of contra-indicants. 
On one hand, government, daily growing more invidious from 
an apparent increase of the meansofstrength, was every day: 
growing more contemptible by real weakness. Nor was this 
dissolution confined to government commonly so called. It 
extended to Parliament, which was losing not a little in its 
dignity and estimation by an opinion of its not acting on 
worthy motives. On the other hand, the desires of the 
people (partly natural and partly infused into them by art) 
appeared in so wild and inconsiderate a manner with regard 
to the economical object, (for I set aside for a moment the 
dreadful tampering with the body of the Constitution itself,) 
that, if their petitions had literally been complied with, the 
state would have been convulsed, and a gate would have 
been opened through which all property might be sacked and 
ravaged. Nothing could have saved the public from the 
mischiefs of the false reform but its absurdity, which would 
soon have brought itself, and with it all real reform, into dis- 
credit. This would have left a rankling wound in the hearts 
of the people, who would know they had failed in the accom- 
plishment of their wishes, but who, like the rest of mankind 
in all ages, would impute the blame to anything rather than 
to their own proceedings. But there were then persons in 
the world who: nourished complaint, and would have been 
thoroughly disappointed,if the people wereever satisfied. I 
was not of that humour. I wished that they should be satisfied. 
It was my aim to give to the people the substance of what I 


632 BURKE 


knew they desired, and what I thought was right,whether they 
desired it or not, before it had been modified for them into 
senseless petitions. I knew that there isa manifest, marked 
distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incap- 
able of any design, will constantly be confounding,—that is, 
a marked distinction between change and reformation. The 
former alters the substance of the objects themselves, and 
gets rid of all their essential good as well as of all the acciden- 
tal evil annexed to them. Change is novelty ; and whether 
it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, 
or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon 
which reformation is desired, can not be certainly known be- 
forehand. Reform is not a change in the substance or in 
the primary modification of the object, but a direct applica- - 
tion of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as 
that is removed, all is sure. It stops there ; and if it fails, 
the substance which underwent the operation, at the very 
worst, is but where it was. 

All this, in effect, I think, but am not sure, I have said 
elsewhere. It can not at this time be too often repeated, line 
upon line, precept upon precept, until it comes into the cur- 
rency of a proverb,—To innovate is not to reform. The 
French revolutionists complained of everything ; they refused 
to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all, 
unchanged. Theconsequences are before us,—not in remote 
history, not in future prognostication: they are about us; 
they are upon us. They shake the public security; they 
menace private enjoyment. They dwarf the growth of the 
young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they 
stop ourway. ‘They infest us in town; they pursue us to the 
country. Our business is interrupted, our repose is troubled, 
our pleasures are saddened, our very studies are poisoned and 
perverted, and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance, 
by the enormous evils of this dreadful innovation. The 
Revolution harpies of France, sprung from Night and Hell, 
or from that chaotic Anarchy which generates equivocally 
“ all monstrous, all prodigious things,” cuckoo-like, adulter- 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 633 


ously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the 
nest of every neighbouring state. These obscene harpies, 
who deck themselves in I know not what divine attributes, 
but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey, (both 
mothers and daughters,) flutter over our heads, and souse 
down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, 
unravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal. 

If his Grace can contemplate the result of this complete 
innovation, or, as some friends of his will call it, reform, in 
the whole body of its solidity and compound mass, at which, 
as Hamlet says, the face of heaven glows with horror and 
indignation, and which, in truth, makes every reflecting mind 
and every feeling heart perfectly thought-sick, without a 
thorough abhorrence of everything they say and everything 
they do, I am amazed at the morbid strength or the natural 
infirmity of his mind. 

It was, then, not my love, but my hatred to innovation, 
that produced my plan of reform. Without troubling my- 
self with the exactness of the logical diagram, I considered 
them as things substantially opposite. It was to prevent 
that evil, that I proposed the measures which his Grace is 
pleased, and I am not sorry he is pleased, to recall to my 
recollection. I had (what I hope that noble Duke will re- 
member in all his operations) a state to preserve, as well as 
a state to reform. I had a people to gratify, but not to in- 
flame or to mislead. I do not claim half the credit for what 
I did as for what I prevented from being done. In that 
situation of the public mind, I did not undertake, as was 
then proposed, to new-model the House of Commons or 
the House of Lords, or to change the authority under which 
any officer of the crown acted, who was suffered at all to 
exist. Crown, lords, commons, judicial system, system of 
administration, existed as they had existed before, and in 
the mode and manner in which they had always existed. 
My measures were, what I then truly stated them to the 
House to be, in their intent, healing and mediatorial. A 
complaint was made of too much influence in the House of 


634 BURKE 


Commons: I reduced it in both Houses; and I gave my 
reasons, article by article, for every reduction, and showed 
why I thought it safe for the service of the state. I heaved 
the lead every inch of way I made. A disposition to expense 
was complained of: to that I opposed, not mere retrench- 
ment, but a system of economy, which would make a random 
expense, without plan or foresight, in future, not easily prac- 
ticable. I proceeded upon principles of research to put me in 
possession of my matter, on principles of method to regulate 
it, and on principles in the human mind and in civil affairs 
to secure and perpetuate the operation. I conceived noth- 
ing arbitrarily, nor proposed anything to be done by the will 
and pleasure of others or my own,—but by reason, and by. 
reason only. I have ever abhorred, since the first dawn of 
my understanding to this its obscure twilight, all the opera- 
tions of opinion, fancy, inclination, and will, in the affairs of 
government, where only a sovereign reason, paramount to 
all forms of legislation and administration, should dictate. 
Government is made for the very purpose of opposing that 
reason to will and to caprice, in the reformers or in the re- 
formed, in the governors or in the governed, in kings, in 
senates, or in people. 

On a careful review, therefore, and analysis of all the com- 
ponent parts of the civil list, and on weighing them against 
each other, in order to make as much as possible all of them 
a subject of estimate, (the foundation and corner-stone of all 
regular, provident economy,) it appeared to me evident that 
this was impracticable, whilst that part called the pension list 
was totally discretionary in its amount. For this reason, 
and for this only, I proposed to reduce it, both in its gross 
quantity and in its larger individual proportions, to a cer- 
tainty ; lest, if it were left without a general limit, it might 
eat up the civil list service,—if suffered to be granted in por- 
tions too great for the fund, it might defeat its own end, and, 
by unlimited allowances to some, it might disable the crown 
in means of providing for others. The pension list was to 
be kept as a sacred fund; but it could not be kept as a con- 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 635 


stant, open fund, sufficient for growing demands, if some 
demands would wholly devour it. The tenor of the act will 
show that it regarded the civil list only, the reduction of 
which to some sort of estimate was my great object. 

No other of the crown funds did I meddle with, because 
they had not the same relations. This of the four and a half 
per cents does his Grace imagine had escaped me, or had es- 
caped all the men of business who acted with me in those 
regulations? I knew that such a fund existed, and that pen- 
sions had been always granted on it, before his Grace was 
born. This fund was full in my eye. It was full in the 
eyes of those who worked with me. It was left on principle. 
On principle I did what was then done; and on principle what 
was left undone was omitted. I did not dare to rob the 
nation of all funds to reward merit. If I pressed this point 
too close, I acted contrary to the avowed principles on which 
I went. Gentlemen are very fond of quoting me; but if any 
one thinks it worth his while to know the rules that guided 
me in my plan of reform, he will read my printed speech on 
that subject, at least what is contained from page 230to page 
241 in the second volume of the collection? which a friend 
has given himself the trouble to make of my publications. 
Be this as it may, these two bills (though achieved with the 
greatest labour, and management of every sort, both within 
and without the House) were only a part, and but a small 
- part, of a very large system, comprehending all the objects I 
stated in opening my proposition, and, indeed, many more, 
which I just hinted at in my speech to the electors of Bristol, 
when I was put out of that representation. All these, in 
some state or other of forwardness, I have long had by me. 

But do I justify his Majesty’s grace on these grounds? I 
think them the least of my services. The time gave them 
an occasional value. What Ihave done in the way of politi- 
cal economy was far from confined to this body of measures. 
I did not comeinto Parliament to con my lesson. I had 
earned my pension before I set my foot in St. Stephen’s 
Chapel. I was prepared and disciplined to this political war- 


636 BURKE 


fare. The first session I satin Parliament, I found it necessary 
to analyze the whole commercial, financial, constitutional, and 
foreign interests of Great Britain and its empire. A great 
deal was then done ; and more, far more, would have been 
done, if more had been permitted by events. Then, in the 
vigour of my manhood, my constitution sunk under my labour. 
Had I then died, (and I seemed to myself very near death,) 
I had then earned for those who belong to me more than the 
Duke of Bedford’s ideas of service are of power to estimate. 
But, in truth, these services Iam called to account for are not 
those on which I value myself the most. If I were to call 
for a reward, (which I have never done,) it should be for 
those in which for fourteen years without intermission J 
showed the most industry and had the least success: I mean 
in the affairs of India. They are those on which I value my- 
self the most: most for the importance, most for the labour, 
most forthe judgment, most for constancy and perseverance in 
the pursuit. Others may value them most for the intention. 
In that, surely, they are not mistaken. 

Does his Grace think that they who advised the Crown to 
make my retreat easy considered me only as an economist ? 
That, well understood, however, isa good deal. If I had not 
deemed it of some value, I should not have made political 
economy an object of my humble studies from my very early 
youth to near the end of my service in Parliament, even 
before (at least to any knowledge of mine) it had em- 
ployed the thoughts of speculative men in other parts of 
Europe. At that time it was still in its infancy in England, 
where, in the last century, it had its origin. Great and learned 
men thought my studies were not wholly thrown away, and 
deigned to communicate with me now and then on some par- 
ticulars of their immortal works. Something of these studies 
may appear incidentally in some of the earliest things I pub- 
lished. The House has been witness to their effect, and has 
profited of them, more or less, for above eight-and-twenty 
years. 

To their estimate I leave the matter. I was not, like his 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 637 


Grace of Bedford, swaddled and rocked and dandled into a 
legislator : “‘ Nitor in adversum”’ is the motto for a man like 
me. I possessed not one of the qualities nor cultivated one 
of the arts that recommend men to the favour and protection 
of the great. I was not made fora minionoratool. As little 
did I follow the trade of winning the hearts by imposing on 
the understandings of the people. At every step of my prog- 
ress in life, (for in every step was I traversed and opposed,) 
and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my pass- 
port, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honour 
of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not 
wholly unacquainted with its laws and the whole system of 
its interests both abroad and at home. Otherwise, no rank, 
no toleration even, for me. I had no arts but manly arts. 
On them I have stood, and, please God, in spite of the Duke 
of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, to the last gasp will 
I stand. 

Had his Grace condescended to inquire concerning the 
person whom hehas not thought it below him to reproach, 
he might have found that, in the whole course of my life, I 
have never, on any pretense of economy, or on any other 
pretense, so much as in a single instance, stood between any 
man and his reward of service or his encouragement in use- 
ful talent and pursuit, from the highest of those services and 
pursuits, to the lowest. On thecontrary, I have on an hun- 
dred occasions exerted myself with singular zeal to forward 
every man’s even tolerable pretensions. I have more than 
once had good-natured reprehensions from my friends for 
carrying the matter tosomething bordering on abuse. This 
line of conduct, whatever its merits might be, was partly ow- 
ing to natural disposition, but I think full as much to reason 
and principle. I looked on the consideration of public 
service or public ornament to be real and very justice ; and 
I ever held a scanty and penurious justice to partake of the 
nature of awrong. I held it to be, in its consequences, the 
worst economy in the world. In saving money I soon can 
count up all the good Ido; but when by acold penury I 


638 BURKE 


blast the abilities of a nation, and stunt the growth of its 
active energies, the ill I may do is beyond all calculation. 
Whether it be too much or too little, whatever I have done 
has been general and systematic. JI have never entered into 
those trifling vexations and oppressive details that have been 
falsely and most ridiculously laid to my charge. 

Did I blame the pensions given to Mr. Barre and Mr. 
Dunning between the proposition and execution of my plan? 
No! surely, no! Those pensions were within my principles. 
I assert it, those gentlemen deserved their pensions, their 
titles,—all they had ; and if more they had, I should have 
been but pleased the more. They were men of talents ; 
they were men of service. I put the profession of the law 
out of the question in one of them. It is a service that re- 
wards itself. But their public service, though from their 
abilities unquestionably of more value than mine, in its quan- 
tity and in its duration was not to be mentioned with it. 
But I never could drive ahard bargain in my life, concerning 
any matter whatever ; and least of all do I know how to hag- 
gle and huckster with merit. Pension for myself I obtained 
none ; nor did I solicit any. Yet I was loaded with hatred 
for everything that was withheld, and with obloquy for 
everything that was given. I was thus left to support the 
grants of a name ever dear to me and ever venerable to the 
world in favour of those who were no friends of mine or of 
his, against the rude attacks of those who were at that time 
friends to the grantees and their own zealous partisans. I 
have never heard the Earl of Lauderdale complain of these 
pensions. He finds nothing wrong till he comes to me. 
This is impartiality, in the true, modern, revolutionary 
style. 

Whatever I did at that time, so far as it regarded order 
and economy, is stable and eternal, as all principles must be. 
A particular order of things may be altered: order itself 
can not lose its value. As to other particulars, they are 
variable by time and by circumstances. Laws of regulation 
are not fundamental laws. The public exigencies are the 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 639 


masters of all such laws. They rule the laws, and are not to 
be ruled by them. They who exercise the legislative power 
at the time must judge. 

It may be new to his Grace, but I beg leave to tell him 
that mere parsimony is not economy. It is separable in 
theory from it; and in fact it may or it may not be a part 
of economy, according to circumstances. Expense, and 
great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. 
If parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds 
of that virtue, there is, however, another and an higher 
economy. Economy is a distributive virtue, and con- 
sists, not in saving, but in selection. Parsimony requires 
no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no 
comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct, and that not an 
instinct of the noblest kind, may produce this false economy 
in perfection. The other economy has larger views. It 
demands a discriminating judgment, and a firm, sagacious 
mind. It shuts one door to impudent importunity, only to 
open another, and a wider, to unpresuming merit. If none 
but meritorious service or real talent were to be rewarded, this 
nation has not wanted, and this nation will not want, the means 
of rewarding all the service it ever will receive, and encourag- 
ing all the merit it ever will produce. No state, since the 
foundation of society, has been impoverished by that species 
of profusion. Hadthe economy of selection and proportion 
been at all times observed, we should not now have had an 
overgrown Duke of Bedford, to oppress the industry of 
humble men, and to limit, by the standard of his own con- 
ceptions, the justice, the bounty, or, if he pleases, the charity 
of the crown. 

His Grace may think as meanly as he will of my deserts 
in the far greater part of my conduct in life. It is free for 
himtodoso. There will always besome difference of opinion 
in the value of political services. But there is one merit of 
mine which he, of all men living, ought to be the last to call 
in question. I have supported with very great zeal, and I 
am told with some degree of success, those opinions, or, if 


640 BURKE 


his Grace likes another expression better, those old pre- 
judices, which buoy up the ponderous mass of his nobility, 
wealth, and titles. I have omitted no exertion to prevent 
him and them from sinking to that level to which the mere- 
tricious French faction his Grace at least coquets with omit 
no exertion to reduce both. I have done all I could to dis- 
countenance their inquiries into the fortunes of those who 
hold large portions of wealth without any apparent merit of 
their own. I have strained every nerve to keep the Duke 
of Bedford in that situation which alone makes him my 
superior. Your Lordship has been a witness of the use 
he makes of that preeminence. 

But be it that this is virtue; be it that there is virtue in 
this well-selected rigour: yet all virtues are not equally be- 
coming to all men and at all times. There are crimes, 
undoubtedly there are crimes, which in all seasons of our 
existence ought to put a generous antipathy in action,— 
crimes that provoke an indignant justice, and call forth a 
warm and animated pursuit. But all things that concern 
what I may call the preventive police of morality, all things 
merely rigid, harsh, and censorial, the antiquated moralists 
at whose feet I was brought up would not have thought 
these the fittest matter to form the favourite virtues of 
young men of rank. What might have been well enough, 
and have been received with a veneration mixed with awe 
and terror, from an old, severe, crabbed Cato, would have 
wanted something of propriety in the young Scipios, the 
ornament of the Roman nobility, in the flower of their life. 
But the times, the morals, the masters, the scholars, have all 
undergone a thorough revolution. It is a vile, illiberal 
school, this new French academy of the sans-culottes. There 
is nothing in it that is fit for a gentleman to learn. 

Whatever its vogue may be, I still flatter myself that the 
parents of the growing generation will be satisfied with 
what is to be taught to their children in Westminster, in 
Eton, or in Winchester; I still indulge the hope that no 
srown gentleman or nobleman of our time will think of 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 641 


finishing at Mr. Thelwall’s lecture whatever may have been 
left incomplete at the old universities of his country. I 
would give to Lord Grenville and Mr. Pitt for a motto what 
was said of a Roman censor or pretor (or what was he ?) 
who in virtue of a Senatusconsultum shut up certain acade- 
mies,—‘ Cludere ludum impudentiz jussit.” Every honest 
father of a family in the kingdom will rejoice at the break- 
ing-up for the holidays, and will pray that there may bea 
very long vacation, in all such schools. 

The awful state of the time, and not myself, or my own 
justification, is my true object in what I now write, or in 
what I shall ever write or say. It little signifies to the 
world what becomes of such things as me, or even as the 
Duke of Bedford. What I say about either of us is nothing 
more than a vehicle, as you, my Lord, will easily perceive, 
to convey my sentiments on matters far more worthy of 
your attention. It is when I stick to my apparent first sub- 
ject that I ought to apologize, not when I depart from it. 
I therefore must beg your Lordship’s pardon for again re- 
suming it after this very short digression,—assuring you 
that I shall never altogether lose sight of such matter as 
persons abler than I am may turn to some profit. 

The Duke of Bedford conceives that he is obliged to call 
the attention of the House of Peers to his Majesty’s grant 
to me, which he considers as excessive and out of all bounds. 

I know not how it has happened, but it really seems, that, 
whilst his Grace was meditating his well-considered censure 
upon me, he fell into a sort of sleep. Homer nods, and the 
Duke of Bedford may dream; and as dreams (even his 
golden dreams) are apt to be ill-pieced and incongruously 
put together, his Grace preserved his idea of reproach to me, 
but took the subject-matter from the crown grants to his 
own family. This is “the stuff of which his dreams are 
made.” In that way of putting things together his Grace is 
perfectly in the right. The grants to the House of Russell 
were so enormous as not only to outrage economy, but even 


to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the levia- 
41 


642 BURKE 


than among all the creatures.of the crown. He tumbles 
about his unwieldy bulk, he plays and frolics in the ocean of 
the royal bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst “ he lies float- 
ing many a rood,” he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, 
his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which 
he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers 
me all over with the spray, everything of him and about 
him is from the throne. Is it for him to question the dis- 
pensation of the royal favour? 

I really am at a loss to draw any sort of parallel between 
the public merits of his Grace, by which he justifies the 
grants he holds, and these services of mine, on the favourable 
construction of which I have obtained what his Grace so 
much disapproves. In private life I have not at all the 
honour of acquaintance with the noble Duke; but I ought 
to presume, and it costs me nothing to do so, that he 
abundantly deservesthe esteem and love of all who live with 
him. But as to public service, why, truly, it would not be 
more ridiculous for me to compare myself, in rank, in fortune, 
in splendid descent, in youth, strength, or figure, with the 
Duke of Bedford, than to make a parallel between his services 
and my attempts to be useful to my country. It would not 
be gross adulation, but uncivil irony, to say that he has 
any public merit of his own to keep alive the idea of the 
services by which his vast landed pensions were obtained. 
My merits, whatever they are, are original and personal : 
his are derivative. It is his ancestor, the original pensioner, 
that has laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit which 
makes his Grace so very delicate and exceptious about the 
merit of all other grantees of the crown. Had he permitted 
me to remain in quiet, I should have said, “ ’Tis his estate ; 
that’s enough. It is his by law: what have I to do with it 
or its history?” Hewould naturally have said, on his side, 
“Tis this man’s fortune. He is as good now, as my ances- 
tor was two hundred and fifty yearsago. I am a young 
man with very old pensions; he is an old man with very 
young pensions: that’s all.’ 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 643 


Why will his Grace, by attacking me, force me reluctantly 
to compare my little merit with that which obtained from 
the crown those prodigies of profuse donation by which he 
tramples on the mediocrity of humble and laborious indi- 
viduals? I would willingly leave him to the Herald’s 
College, which the philosophy of the sans-culottes (prouder 
by far than all the Garters, and Norroys, and Clarencieux, 
and Rouge-Dragons that ever pranced into a procession of 
what his friends call aristocrats and despots) will abolish 
with contumely and scorn. These historians, recorders, and 
blazoners of virtues and arms differ wholly from that other 
description of historians who never assign any act of poli- 
ticians to a good motive. These gentle historians, on the 
contrary, dip their pens in nothing but the milk of human 
kindness. They seek no further for merit than the preamble 
of a patent or the inscription on atomb. With them every 
man created a peer is first an hero ready made. They judge 
of every man’s capacity for office by the offices he has filled ; 
and the more offices, the more ability. Every general officer 
with them is a Marlborough, every statesman a Burleigh, 
every judge a Murray ora Yorke. They who, alive, were 
laughed at or pitied by all their acquaintance make as good 
a figure as the best of them in the pages of Guillim, Ed- 
mondson, and Collins. 

To these recorders, so full of good nature to the great and 
prosperous, I would willingly leave the first Baron Russell 
and Earl of Bedford, and the merits of his grants. But the 
aulnager, the weigher, the meter of grants will not suffer us 
to acquiesce in the judgment of the prince reigning at the 
time when they were made. They are never good to those 
who earn them. Well, then, since the new grantees have 
war made on them by the old, and that the word of the 
sovereign is not to be taken, let us turn our eyes to history, 
in which great men have always a pleasure in contemplating 
the heroic origin of their house. 

The first peer of the name, the first purchaser of the 
grants, was a Mr. Russell, a person of an ancient gentleman’s 


* 


644 BURKE 


family, raised by being a minion of Henry the Eighth. As 
there generally is some resemblance of character to create 
these relations, the favourite was in all likelihood much 
such another as his master. The first of those immoderate 
grants was not taken from the ancient demesne of the crown, 
but from the recent confiscation of the ancient nobility of 
the land. The lion, having sucked the blood of his prey, 
threw the offal carcass to the jackal in waiting. Having 
tasted once the food of confiscation, the favourites became 
fierce and ravenous. This worthy favourite’s first grant was 
from the lay nobility. The second, infinitely improving on 
the enormity of the first, was from the plunder of the 
Church. In truth, his Grace is somewhat excusable for his 
dislike to a grant like mine, not only in its quantity, but in 
its kind, so different from his own. 

Mine was from a mild and benevolent sovereign: his from 
Henry the Eighth. 

Mine had not its fund in the murder of any innocent per- 
son of illustrious rank,? or in the pillage of any body of 
unoffending men. His grants were from the aggregate and 
consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously legal, and 
from possessions voluntarily surrendered by the lawful pro- 
prietors with the gibbet at their door. 

The merit of the grantee whom he derives from was that 
of being a prompt and greedy instrument of a levelling ty- 
rant, who oppressed all descriptions of his people, but who 
fell with particular fury on everything that was great and 
noble. Mine has been in endeavouring to screen every man, 
in every class, from oppression, and particularly in defend- 
ing the high and eminent, who, in the bad times of confiscat- 
ing princes, confiscating chief governors, or confiscating 
demagogues, are the most exposed to jealousy, avarice, and 
envy. 

The merit of the original grantee of his Grace’s pensions 
was in giving his hand to the work, and partaking the spoil, 
with a prince who plundered a part of the national Church 
of his time and country. Mine was in defending the 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 645 


whole of the national Church of my own time and my own 
country, and the whole of the national Churches of all coun- 
tries, from the principles and the examples which lead to 
ecclesiastical pillage, thence to a contempt of all prescriptive 
titles, thence to the pillage of all property, and thence to 
universal desolation. 

The merit of the origin of his Grace’s fortune was in being 
a favourite and chief adviser to a prince who left no liberty to 
their native country. My endeavour was to obtain liberty for 
the municipal country in which I was born, and for all de- 
scriptions and denominations in it. Mine was to support 
with unrelaxing vigilance every right, every privilege, every 
franchise, in this my adopted, my dearer, and more compre- 
hensive country ; and not only to preserve those rights in this 
chief seat of empire, but in every nation, in every land, in 
every climate, language, and religion, in the vast domain that 
still is under the protection, and the larger that was once 
under the protection, of the British crown. 

His founder’s merits were, by arts in which he served his 
master and made his fortune, to bring poverty, wretchedness, 
and depopulation on his country. Mine were under a benev- 
olent prince, in promoting the commerce, manufactures, and 
agriculture of his kingdom,—in which his Majesty shows an 
eminent example, who even in his amusements is a patriot, 
and in hours of leisure an improver of his native soil. 

His founder's merit was the merit of a gentleman raised 
by the arts of a court and the protection of a Wolsey to the 
eminence of a great and potent lord. His merit in that em- 
inence was, by instigating a tyrant to injustice, to provoke a 
people to rebellion. My merit was, to awaken the sober part 
of the country, that they might put themselves on their guard 
against any one potent lord, or any greater number of potent 
lords, or any combination of great leading men of any sort, 
if ever they should attempt to proceed in the same courses, 
but in the reverse order,—that is, by instigating a corrupted 
populace to rebellion, and, through that rebellion, introduc- 
ing a tyranny yet worse than the tyranny which his Grace’s 


646 BURKE 


ancestor supported, and of which he profited in the manner 
we behold in the despotism of Henry the Eighth. 

The political merit of the first pensioner of his Grace’s 
house was that of being concerned as a counsellor of state 
in advising, and in his person executing, the conditions of a 
dishonourable peace with France,—the surrendering the fort- 
ress of Boulogne, then our outguard on the Continent. By 
that surrender, Calais, the key of France, and the bridle in 
the mouth of that power, was not many years afterwards 
finally lost. My merit has been in resisting the power and 
pride of France, under any form of its rule; but in opposing 
it with the greatest zeal and earnestness, when that rule ap- 
peared in the worst form it could assume,—the worst, indeed, 
which the prime cause and principle of all evil could possibly 
give it. It was my endeavour by every means to excite a 
spirit in the House, where I had the honour of a seat, for 
carrying on with early vigour and decision the most clearly 
just and necessary war that this or any nation ever carried on, 
in order to save my country from the iron yoke of its power, 
and from the more dreadful contagion of its principles,—to 
preserve, while they can be preserved, pure and untainted, 
the ancient, inbred integrity, piety, good-nature, and good- 
humour of the people of England, from the dreadful pestilence 
which, beginning in France, threatens to lay waste the whole 
moral and in a great degree the whole physical world, having 
done both in the focus of its most intense malignity. 

The labours of his Grace’s founder merited the “ curses, not 
loud, but deep,” of the Commons of England, on whom he 
and his master had effected a complete Parliamentary Re- 
form, by making them, in their slavery and humiliation, the 
true and adequate representatives of a debased, degraded, 
and undone people. My merits were in having had an active, 
though not always an ostentatious share, in every one act, 
without exception, of undisputed constitutional utility in 
my time, and in having supported, on all occasions, the 
authority, the efficiency, and the privileges of the Commons 
of Great Britain. I ended my services by a recorded and 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 647 


fully reasoned assertion on their own journals of their con- 
stitutional rights, and a vindication of their constitutional 
conduct. I laboured in all things to merit their inward appro- 
bation, and (along with the assistants of the largest, the 
greatest, and best of my endeavours) I received their free, 
unbiased, public, and solemn thanks. 

Thus stands the account of the comparative merits of the 
crown grants which compose the Duke of Bedford’s fortune 
as balanced against mine. In the name of common sense, 
why should the Duke of Bedford think that none but of the 
House of Russell are entitled to the favour of the crown? 
Why should he imagine that no king of England has been 
capable of judging of merit but King Henry the Eighth? 
Indeed, he will pardon me, he is a little mistaken: all virtue 
did not end in the first Earl of Bedford; all discernment did 
not lose its vision when his creator closed his eyes, Let him 
remit his rigour on the disproportion between merit and re- 
ward in others, and they will make no inquiry into the origin 
of his fortune. They will regard with much more satisfaction, 
as he will contemplate with infinitely more advantage, what- 
ever in his pedigree has been dulcified by an exposure to the 
influence of heaven in a long flow of generations from the 
hard, acidulous, metallic tincture of the spring. It is little 
to be doubted that several of his forefathers in that long series 
have degenerated into honour and virtue. Let the Duke of 
Bedford (I am sure he will) reject with scorn and horror the 
counsels of the lecturers, those wicked panders to avarice and 
ambition, who would tempt him, in the troubles of his coun- 
try, to seek another enormous fortune from the forfeitures of 
another nobility and the plunder of another Church. Let 
him (and I trust that yet he will) employ all the energy of 
his youth and all the resources of his wealth to crush rebel- 
lious principles which have no foundation in morals, and 
rebellious movements that have no provocation in tyranny. 

Then will be forgot the rebellions which, by a doubtful 
priority in crime, his ancestor had provoked and extinguished. 
On such a conduct in the noble Duke, many of his country- 


648 BURKE 


men might, and with some excuse might, give way to the 
enthusiasm of their gratitude, and, in the dashing style of 
some of the old declaimers, cry out, that, if the Fates had 
found no other way in which they could give a* Duke of 
Bedford and his opulence as props to a tottering world, then 
the butchery of the Duke of Buckingham might be tolerated ; 
it might be regarded even with complacency, whilst in the 
heir of confiscation they saw the sympathizing comforter of 
the martyrs who suffer under the cruel confiscation of this 
day, whilst they beheld with admiration his zealous protec- 
tion of the virtuous and loyal nobility of France, and his 
manly support of his brethren, the yet standing nobility and 
gentry of his native land. Then his Grace’s merit would be 
pure and new and sharp, as fresh from the mint of honour. 
As he pleased, he might reflect honour on his predecessors, 
or throw it forward on those who were to succeed him. He 
might be the propagator of the stock of honour, or the root 
of it, as he thought proper. 

Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succes- 
sion, I should have been, according to my mediocrity and 
the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of founder of a 
family : I should have left a son, who, in all the points in 
which personal merit can be viewed, in science, in erudition, 
in genius, in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity, in 
every liberal sentiment and every liberal accomplishment, 
would not have shown himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford 
or to any of those whom he traces in his line. His Grace 
very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack 
upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me. 
He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symme- 
trized every disproportion. It would not have been for that 
successor to resort to any stagnant, wasting reservoir of merit 
in me or inany ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living 
spring of generous and manly action. Every day he lived he 
would have repurchased the bounty of the crown, and ten 
times more, if ten times more he had received. Hewas made 
a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatever but in the 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 649 


performance of some duty. At this exigent moment the 
loss of a finished man is not easily supplied. 

But a Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, 
and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has 
ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous 
weakness might suggest) a far better. The storm has gone 
over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late 
hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my 
honours, I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the 
earth. There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recog- 
nize the Divine justice, and in some degree submit to it. 
But whilst I humble myself before God, I do not know that 
it is forbidden to repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate 
men. The patience of Job isproverbial. After some ofthe 
convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted 
himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do 
not find him blamed for reprehending, and with a consider- 
able degree of verbal asperity, those ill-natured neighbours of 
his who visited his dunghill to read moral, political, and 
economical lectures on his misery. I am alone. I have 
none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my Lord, I 
greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would give a 
peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honour in 
the world. Thisis the appetite but ofa few. Itisaluxury, it 
is a privilege, it is an indulgence for those who are at their 
ease. But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are 
made to shrink from pain and poverty and disease. It isan 
instinct ; and under the direction of reason, instinct is always 
in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought 
to have succeeded me are gone beforeme. They who should 
have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors. 
I owe to the dearest relation (which ever must subsist in 
memory) that act of piety which he would have performed to 
me: I owe it to him to show that he was not descended, as 
the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy 
parent. 

The crown has considered me after long service ; the crown 


650 BURKE 


has paid the Duke of Bedford by advance. He has hada 
long credit for any service which he may perform hereafter. 
He is secure, and long may he be secure, in his advance, 
whether he performs any services or not. But let him take 
care how he endangers the safety of that Constitution which 
secures his own utility or his own insignificance, or how he 
discourages those who take up even puny arms to defend an 
order of things which, like the sun of heaven, shines alike on 
the useful and the worthless. His grants are ingrafted on 
the public law of Europe, covered with the awful hoar of in- 
numerable ages. They are guarded by the sacred rules of 
prescription, found in that full treasury of jurisprudence from 
which the jejuneness and penury of our municipal law has by 
degrees been enriched and strengthened. This prescription I 
had my share (a very full share) in bringing to its perfection.® 
The Duke of Bedford will stand as long as prescriptive law 
endures,—as long as the great, stable laws of property, com- 
mon to us with all civilized nations, are kept in their integ- 
rity, and without the smallest intermixture of the laws, max- 
ims, principles, or precedents of the Grand Revolution. They 
are secure against all changes but one. The whole Revolu- 
tionary system, institutes, digest, code, novels, text, gloss, 
comment, are not only not the same, but they are the very re- 
verse, and the reverse fundamentally, of all the laws on which 
civil life has hitherto been upheld in all the governments of 
the world. The learned professors of the Rights of Man re- 
gard prescription not as a title to bar all claim set up against 
old possession, but they look on prescription as itself a bar 
against the possessor and proprietor. They hold an imme- 
morial possession to be no more than a long continued 
and therefore an aggravated injustice. 

Such are their ideas, such their religion, and such their law. 
But as to our country and our race, as long as the well-com- 
pacted structure of our Church and State, the sanctuary, 
the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, 
defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple,® shall 
stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion,—as long as 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 65! 


the British monarchy, not more limited than fenced by the 
orders of the state, shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, 
rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double 
belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful 
structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land,— so 
long the mounds and dikes of the low, fat, Bedford level will 
have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers 
of France. As long as our sovereign lord the king, and his 
faithful subjects, the lords and commons of this realm,—the 
triple cord which no man can break,—the solemn, sworn, 
constitutional frank-pledge of this nation,—the firm guaran- 
ties of each other’s being and each other’s rights,—the 
joint and several securities, each in its place and order, for 
every kind and every quality of property and of dignity,— 
as long as these endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is safe, 
and we are all safe together,—the high from the blights of 
envy and the spoliations of rapacity, the low from the iron 
hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of contempt. 
Amen! and so be it! and so it will be,— 


“Dum domus AEnez Capitoli immobile saxum 
Accolet, imperiumque pater Romanus habebit.” 


But if the rude inroad of Gallic tumult, with its sophis- 
tical rights of man to falsify the account, and its sword 
as a make-weight to throw into the scale, shall be introduced 
into our city by amisguided populace, set on by proud great 
men, themselves blinded and intoxicated by a frantic ambi- 
tion, we shall all of us perish and be overwhelmed in a com- 
monruin. Ifa great storm blow on our coast, it will cast 
the whales on the strand, as well as the periwinkles. His 
Grace will not survive the poor grantee he despises—no, not 
for a twelvemonth. If the great look for safety in the 
services they render to this Gallic cause, it is to be foolish 
even above the weight of privilege allowed to wealth. If 
his Grace be one of these whom they endeavour to proselytize, 
he ought to be aware of the character of the sect whose doc- 
trines he is invited to embrace. With them insurrection is 


652 BURKE 


the most sacred of revolutionary duties to the state. In- 
gratitude to benefactors is the first of revolutionary virtues. 
Ingratitude is, indeed, their four cardinal virtues compacted 
and amalgamated into one; and he will find it in everything 
that has happened since the commencement of the philo- 
sophic Revolution to this hour. If he pleads the merit of 
having performed the duty of insurrection against the order 
he lives in, (God forbid he ever should !) the merit of others 
will be to perform the duty of insurrection against him. If 
he pleads (again God forbid he should, and I do not 
suspect he will) his ingratitude to the crown for its creation 
of his family, others will plead their right and duty to pay 
him in kind. They will laugh, indeed they will laugh, at 
his parchment and his wax. His deeds will be drawn out 
with the rest of the lumber of his evidence-room, and burnt 
to the tuneof “ca ira” in the courts of Bedford (then Equality) 
House. 

Am I to blame, if I attempt to pay his Grace’s hostile re- 
proaches to me with a friendly admonition to himself ? Can 
I be blamed for pointing out to him in what manner he is 
like to be affected, if the sect of the cannibal philosophers of 
France should proselytize any considerable part of this 
people, and, by their joint proselytizing arms, should con- 
quer that government to which his Grace does not seem to 
me to give all the support his own security demands? 
Surely it is proper that he, and that others like him, should 
know the true genius of this sect,—what their opinions are, 
—what they have done, and to whom,—and what (if a prog- 
nostic isto be formed from the dispositions and actions of 
men) it is certain they will do hereafter. He ought to know 
that they have sworn assistance, the only engagement they 
ever will keep, to all in this country who bear a resemblance 
to themselves, and who think, as such, that the whole duty 
of man consists in destruction. They are a misallied and 
disparaged branch of the House of Nimrod. They are the 
Duke of Bedford’s natural hunters; and he is their natural 
game. Because he is not very profoundly reflecting, he 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 653 


sleeps in profound security : they, on the contrary, are always 
vigilant, active, enterprising, and, though far removed from 
any knowledge which makes men estimable or useful, in all 
the instruments and resources of evil their leaders are not 
meanly instructed or insufficiently furnished. Inthe French 
Revolution everything is new, and, from want of preparation 
to meet so unlooked-for an evil, everything is dangerous. 
Never before this time was a set of literary men converted 
into a gang of robbers and assassins; never before did a den 
of bravoes and banditti assume the garb and tone of an 
academy of philosophers. 

Let me tell his Grace, that an union of such characters, 
monstrous as it seems, is not made for producing despicable 
enemies. But if they are formidable as foes, as friends they 
are dreadful indeed. The men of property in France, con- 
fiding in a force which seemed to be irresistible because it 
had never been tried, neglected to prepare for a conflict 
with their enemies at their own weapons. They were found 
in such a situation as the Mexicans were, when they were 
attacked by the dogs, the cavalry, the iron, and the gun- 
powder of an handful of bearded men, whom they did not 
know to exist in Nature. This isa comparison that some, I 
think, have made; and it is just. In France they had their 
enemies within theirhouses. They were even in the bosoms 
of many of them. But they had not sagacity to discern 
their savage character. They seemed tame, and even caress- 
ing. They had nothing but douce humanité in their mouth. 
They could not bear the punishment of the mildest laws on 
the greatest criminals. The slightest severity of justice 
made their flesh creep. The very idea that war existed in 
the world disturbed their repose. Military glory was no 
more, with them, than a splendid infamy. Hardly would 
they hear of self-defense, which they reduced within such 
bounds as to leave it no defense at all. All this while they 
meditated the confiscations and massacres we have seen. 
Had any one told these unfortunate noblemen and gentle- 
men how and by whom the grand fabric of the French mon- 


654 BURKE 


archy under which they flourished would be subverted, they 
would not have pitied him asa visionary, but would have 
tnrned from him as what they call a mauvais plaisant. Yet 
we have seen what has happened. The persons who have 
suffered from the cannibal philosophy of France are so like 
the Duke of Bedford, that nothing but his Grace’s probably 
not speaking quite so good French could enable us to find 
out any difference. A great many of them had as pom- 
pous titles as he, and were of full as illustrious a race; some 
few of them had fortunes as ample; several of them, with- 
out meaning the least disparagement to the Duke of Bed- 
ford, were as wise, and as virtuous, and as valiant, and as 
well educated, and as complete in all the lineaments of men. 
of honour, as he is; and to all this they had added the power- 
ful outguard of a military profession, which, in its nature, 
renders men somewhat more cautious than those who have 
nothing to attend to but the lazy enjoyment of undisturbed 
possessions. But security was their ruin. They are dashed 
to pieces in the storm, and our shores are covered with the 
wrecks. If they had been aware that sucha thing might 
happen, such a thing never could have happened. 

I assure his Grace, that, if I state to him the designs of 
his enemies in a manner which may appear to him ludicrous 
and impossible, I tell him nothing that has not exactly 
happened, point by point, but twenty-four miles from our 
own shore. I assure him that the Frenchified faction, more 
encouraged than others are warned by what has happened in 
France, look at him and his landed possessions as an object 
at once of curiosity and rapacity. He is made for them in 
every part of their double character. As robbers, to them 
he is a noble booty; as speculatists, he is a glorious subject 
for their experimental philosophy. He affords matter for 
an extensive analysis in all the branches of their science, 
geometrical, physical, civil, and political. These philoso- 
phers are fanatics: independent of any interest, which, if it 
operated alone, would make them much more tractable, they 
are carried with such an headlong rage towards every des- 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 655 


perate trial that they would sacrifice the whole human race 
to the slightest of their experiments. I am better able to 
enter into the character of this description of men than the 
noble Duke can be. I have lived long and variously in the 
world. Without any considerable pretensions to literature 
in myself, I have aspired to the love of letters. I have lived 
for a great many years in habitudes with those who professed 
them. I can forma tolerable estimate of what is likely to 
happen from a character chiefly dependent for fame and for- 
tune on knowledge and talent, as well in its morbid and per- 
verted state as in that which is sound and natural. Natur- 
ally, men so formed and finished are the first gifts of Provi- 
dence to the world. But when they have once thrown off 
the fear of God, which was in all ages too often the case, 
and the fear of man, which is now the case, and when in 
that state they come to understand one another, and to act 
in corps, a more dreadful calamity cannot arise out of hell 
to scourge mankind. Nothing can be conceived more hard 
than the heart of a thorough-bred metaphysician. It comes 
nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the 
frailty and passion of aman. It islike that of the Principle 
of Evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, 
defecated evil. Itisno easy operation to eradicate humanity 
from the human breast. What Shakspeare calls the “ com- 
punctious visitings of Nature” will sometimes knock at 
their hearts, and protest against their murderous specula- 
tions. But they have a means of compounding with their 
nature. Their humanity is not dissolved; they only give it 
a long prorogation. They are ready to declare that they do 
not think two thousand years too long a period for the good 
that they pursue. It is remarkable that they never see any 
way to their projected good but by the road of some evil. 
Their imagination is not fatigued with the contemplation of 
human suffering through the wild waste of centuries added 
to centuries of misery and desolation. Their humanity is at 
their horizon,—and, like the horizon, it always flies before 
them. The geometricians and the chemists bring, the one 


656 BURKE 


from the dry bones of their diagrams, and the other from the 
soot of their furnaces, dispositions that make them worse 
than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes which 
are the supports of the moral world. Ambition is come upon 
them suddenly; they are intoxicated with it, and it has 
rendered them fearless of the danger which may from 
thence arise to others or to themselves. These philosophers 
consider men in their experiments no more than they do 
mice in an air-pump or in a recipient of mephitic gas. 
Whatever his Grace may think of himself, they look upon 
him, and everything that belongs to him, with no more 
regard than they do upon the whiskers of that little long- 
tailed animal that has been long the game of the grave, 
demure, insidious, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed, green-eyed 
philosophers, whether going upon two legs or upon four. 
His Grace’s landed possessions are irresistibly inviting to 
an agrarian experiment. They are a downright insult upon 
the rights of man. They are more extensive than the 
territory of many of the Grecian republics; and they are 
without comparison more fertile than most of them. There 
are now republics in Italy, in Germany, and in Switzerland, 
which do not possess anything like so fair and ample a 
domain. There is scope for seven philosophers to proceed 
in their analytical experiments upon: Harrington’s seven dif- 
ferent forms of republics, in the acres of this one Duke. 
Hitherto they have been wholly unproductive to speculation, 
—fitted for nothing but to fatten bullocks, and to produce 
grain for beer, still more to stupefy the dull English under- 
standing. Abbé Sieyés has whole nests of pigeon-holes full 
of constitutions ready-made, ticketed, sorted, and numbered, 
suited to every season and every fancy: some with the top 
of the pattern at the bottom, and some with the bottom at 
the top; some plain, some flowered; some distinguished 
for their simplicity, others for their complexity ; some of 
blood colour, some of boue de Paris; some with directories, 
others without a direction; some with councils of elders 
and councils of youngsters, some without any council at all; 


LETTER TO. A NOBLE LORD 657 


some where the electors choose the representatives, others 
where the representatives choose the clectors ; some in long 
coats, and some in short cloaks; some with pantaloons, some 
without breeches; some with five-shilling qualifications, 
some totally unqualified. So that no constitution-fancier 
may go unsuited from his shop, provided he loves a pattern 
of pillage, oppression, arbitrary imprisonment, confiscation, 
exile, revolutionary judgment, and legalized premeditated 
murder, in any shapes into which they can be put. What 
a pity it is that the progress of experimental philosophy 
should be checked by his Grace’s monopoly! Such are 
their sentiments, I assure him ; such is their language, when 
they dare to speak; and such are their proceedings, when 
they have the means to act. 

Their geographers and geometricians have been some 
time out of practise. It is some time since they have divided 
their own country into squares. That figure has lost the 
charms of its novelty. They want new lands for new trials. 
It is not only the geometricians of the Republic that find 
him a good subject: the chemists have bespoke him, after 
the geometricians have doné with him. As the first set have 
an eye on his Grace’s lands, the chemists are not less taken 
with his buildings. They consider mortar as a very anti- 
revolutionary invention, in its present state, but, properly 
employed, an admirable material for overturning all establish- 
ments. They have found that the gunpowder of ruins is 
far the fittest for making other ruins, and so ad infinitum. 
They have calculated what quantity of matter convertible 
into nitre is to be found in Bedford House, in Woburn 
Abbey, and in what his Grace and his trustees have still 
suffered to stand of that foolish royalist, Inigo Jones, in 
Covent Garden. Churches, play-houses, coffee-houses, all 
alike, are destined to be mingled, and equalized,and blended 
into one common rubbish,—and, well sifted, and lixiviated, 
to crystallize into true, democratic, explosive, insurrectionary 
nitre. Their Academy del Cimento, (per antiphrasin,) with 


Morveau and Hassenfratz at its head, have computed that 
42 | 


658 BURKE 


the brave sans-culottes may make war on all the aristocracy 
of Europe for a twelvemonth out of the rubbish of the Duke 
of Bedford’s buildings.’ 

While the Morveaux and Priestleys are proceeding with 
these experiments upon the Duke of Bedford’s houses, the 
Sieyés, and the rest of the analytical legislators and consti- 
tution-venders, are quite as busy in their trade of decom- 
posing organization, in forming his Grace’s vassals into 
primary assemblies, national guards, first, second, and third 
requisitioners, committees of research, conductors of the 
travelling guillotine, judges of revolutionary tribunals, legis- 
lative hangmen, supervisors of domiciliary visitation, exactors 
of forced loans, and assessors of the maximum. 

The din of all this smithery may some time or other pos- 
sibly wake this noble Duke, and push him to an endeavour to 
save some little matter from their experimental philosophy. 
If he pleads his grants from the crown, he is ruined at the 
outset. If he pleads he has received them from the pillage 
of superstitious corporations, this indeed will stagger them a 
little, because they are enemies to all corporations and to all 
religion. However, they will soon recover themselves, and 
will tell his Grace, or his learned council, that all such prop- 
erty belongs to the nation,—and that it would be more wise 
for him, if he wishes to live the natural term of a citizen, 
(that is, according to Condorcet’s calculation, six months on 
an average,) not to pass for an usurper upon the national 
property. This is what the serjeants-at-law of the rights 
of man will say to the puny apprentices of the common law 
of England. 

Is the genius of philosophy not yet known? ‘You may as 
well think the garden of the Tuileries was well protected 
with the cords of ribbon insultingly stretched by the National 
Assembly to keep the sovereign canaille from intruding on 
the retirement of the poor King of the French as that such 
flimsy cobwebs will stand between the savages of the Revo- 
lution and their natural prey. Deep philosophers are no 
triflers ; brave sans-culottes are no formalists. They will no 


d 


* 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 659 


more regard a Marquis of Tavistock than an Abbot of Tav- 
istock ; the Lord of Woburn will not be more respectable in 
their eyes than the Prior of Woburn; they will make no dif- 
ference between the superior of a Covent Garden of nuns and 
of a Covent Garden of another description. They will not 
care a rush whether his coat is long or short,—whether the 
colour be purple, or blue and buff. They will not trouble 
their heads with what part of his head his hair is cut from ; 
and they will look with equal respect on a tonsure and acrop. 
Their only question will be that of their Legendre, or some 
other of their legislative butchers : How he cuts up ; how 
he tallows in the caul or on the kidneys. 

Is it not a singular phenomenon, that, whilst the sans- 
culotte carcass-butchers and the philosophers of the shambles 
are pricking their dotted lines upon his hide, and, like the 
print of the poor oxthat we see in the shop-windows at Char- 
ing Cross, alive as he is, and thinking no harm in the world, 
he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, and briskets, and into 
all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, and stewing, that, all 
the while they are measuring him, his Grace is measuring me, 
—is invidiously comparing the bounty of the crown with the 
deserts of the defender of his order, andin the same moment 
fawning on those who have the knife half out of the sheath ? 
Poor innocent ! 


“Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, 
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.” 


No man lives too long who lives to do with spirit and suf- 
fer with resignation what Providence pleases to command or 
inflict ; but, indeed, they aresharp incommodities which beset 
old age. It was but the other day, that, on putting in order 
some things which had been brought here, on my taking leave 
of London forever, I looked over a number of fine portraits, 
most of them of persons now dead, but whose society, in my 
better days, made this a proud and happy place. Amongst 
these was the picture of Lord Keppel. It was painted by an 
artist worthy of the subject, the excellent friend of that ex- 


660 BURKE 


cellent man from their earliest youth, and a common friend 
of us both, with whom we lived for many years without a 
moment of coldness, of peevishness, of jealousy, or of jar, to 
the day of our final separation. 

I ever looked on Lord Keppel as one of the greatest and 
best men of his age, and I loved and cultivated him accord- 
ingly. He was much in my heart, and I believe I was in his 
to the very last beat. It was after his trial at Portsmouth 
that he gave me this picture. With what zeal and anxious 
affection I attended him through that his agony of glory,— 
what part my son, in the early flush and enthusiasm of his 
virtue, and the pious passion with which he attached himself 
to all my connections,—with what prodigality we both squan- 
dered ourselves in courting almost every sort of enmity for 
his sake, I believe he felt, just as I should have felt such 
friendship on such an occasion. I partook, indeed, of this 
honour with several of the first and best and ablest in the 
kingdom, but I was behind hand with none. of them ; and I 
am sure, that, if, to the eternal disgrace of this nation, and to 
the total annihilation of every trace of honour and virtue in 
it, things had taken a different turn from what they did, I 
should have attended him to the quarter-deck with no less 
good-will and more pride, though with far other feelings, than 
I partook of the general flow of national joy that attended 
the justice that was done to his virtue. 

Pardon, my Lord, the feeble garrulity of age, which loves to 
diffuse itself in discourse of the departed great. At my 
years we live in retrospect alone; and, wholly unfitted for 
the society of vigorous life, we enjoy, the best balm to all 
wounds, the consolation of friendship, in those only whom 
we have lost forever. Feeling the loss of Lord Keppel at 
all times, at no time did I feel it so much as on the first day 
when I was attacked in the House of Lords. 

Had he lived, that reverend form would have risen in its 
place, and, with a mild, parental reprehension to his nephew, 
the Duke of Bedford, he would have told him that the favour 
of that gracious prince who had honoured his virtues with the 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 661 


government of the navy of Great Britain, and with a seat in. 
the hereditary great council of his kingdom, was not un- 
deservedly shown to the friend of the best portion of his 
life, and his faithful companion and counsellor under his 
rudest trials. He would have told him, that, to whomever 
else these reproaches might be becoming, they were not 
decorous in hisnear kindred. He would have told him, that, 
when men in that rank lose decorum, they lose everything. 
On that day I had a loss in Lord Keppel. But the public 
loss of him in this awful crisis !—I speak from much knowl- 
edge of the person: he never would have listened to any 
compromise with the rabble rout of this sans-culotterie of 
France. His goodness of heart, his reason, his taste, his 
public duty, his principles, his prejudices, would have re- 
pelled him forever from all connection with that horrid 
medley of madness, vice, impiety, and crime. : 
Lord Keppel had two countries: one of descent, and one . 
of birth. Their interest and their glory are the same; and 
his mind was capacious of both. His family was noble, and 
it was Dutch: that is, he was of the oldest and purest no- 
bility that Europe can boast, among a people renowned 
above all others for love of their native land. Though it 
was never shown in insult to any human being, Lord Keppel 
was something high. It was a wild stock of pride, on which 
the tenderest of all hearts had grafted the milder virtues. 
He valued ancient nobility; and he was not disinclined to 
augment it with new honours. He valued the old nobility 
and the new, not as an excuse for inglorious sloth, but as an 
incitement to virtuous activity. He considered it as a sort 
of cure for selfishness and a narrow mind,—conceiving that 
a man born in an elevated place in himself was nothing, but 
everything in what went before and what was to come after 
him. Without much speculation, but by the sure instinct 
of ingenuous feelings, and by the dictates of plain, unso- 
phisticated, natural understanding, he felt that no great 
commonwealth could by any possibility long subsist without 
a body of some kind or other of nobility decorated with 


662 BURKE 


honour and fortified by privilege. This nobility forms the 
chain that connects the ages of a nation, which otherwise 
(with Mr. Paine) would soon be taught that no one genera- 
tion can bind another. He felt that no political fabric could 
be well made, without some such order of things as might, 
through a series of time, afford a rational hope of securing 
unity, coherence, consistency, and stability to the state. He 
felt that nothing else can protect it against the levity of 
courts and the greater levity of the multitude; that to talk 
of hereditary monarchy, without anything else of hereditary 
reverence in the commonwealth, was a low-minded absurdity, 
fit only for those detestable “ fools aspiring to be knaves” 
who began to forge in 1789 the false money of the French 
Constitution; that it isone fatal objection to all new fancied 
and new fabricated republics, (among a people who, once 
possessing such an advantage, have wickedly and insolently 
rejected it,) that the prejudice of an old nobility is a thing 
that cannot be made. It may be improved, it may be cor- 
rected, it may be replenished; men may be taken from it or 
aggregated to it; but the thing itself is matter of inveterate 
Opinion, and therefore can not be matter of mere positive 
institution. He felt that this nobility, in fact, does not exist 
in wrong of other orders of the state, but by them, and for 
them. | 

I knew the man I speak of: and if we can divine the 
future out of what we collect from the past, no person living 
would look with more scorn and horror on the impious par- 
ricide committed on all their ancestry, and on the desperate 
attainder passed on all their posterity, by the Orléans, and 
the Rochefoucaults, and the Fayettes, and the Vicomtes de 
Noailles, and the false Perigords, and the long et cetera of 
the perfidious sans-culottes of the court, who, like demoniacs 
possessed with a spirit of fallen pride and inverted ambition, 
abdicated their dignities, disowned their families, betrayed 
the most sacred of all trusts, and, by breaking to piecesa 
great link of society and all the cramps and holdings of the 
state, brought eternal confusion and desolation on their 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 663 


country. For the fate of the miscreant parricides themselves 
he would have had no pity. Compassion for the myriads of 
men, of whom the world was not worthy, who by their 
means have perished in prisons or on scaffolds, or are pin- 
ing in beggary and exile, would leave no room in his, or in 
any well-formed mind, for any such sensation. We are not 
made at once to pity the oppressor and the oppressed. 

Looking to his Batavian descent, how could he bear to 
behold his kindred, the descendants of the brave nobility of 
Holland, whose blood, prodigally poured out, had, more than 
all the canals, meres, and inundations of their country, pro- 
tected their independence, to behold them bowed in the 
basest servitude to the basest and vilest of the human race, 
—in servitude to those who in no respect were superior in 
dignity or could aspire to a better place than that of hang- 
men to the tyrants to whose sceptered pride they had opposed 
an elevation of soul that surmounted and overpowered the 
loftiness of Castile, the haughtiness of Austria, and the over- 
bearing arrogance of France? 

Could he with patience bear that the children of that no- 
bility who would have deluged their country and given it to 
the sea rather than submit to Louis the Fourteenth, who 
was then in his meridian glory, when his arms were con- 
ducted by the Turennes, by the Luxembourgs, by the Bouf- 
flers, when his councils were directed by the Colberts and 
the Louvois, when his tribunals were filled by the Lamoi- 
gnons and the D’Aguesseaus,—that these should be given up 
to the cruel sport of the Pichegrus, the Jourdans, the San- 
terres, under the Rolands, and Brissots, and Gorsas, and 
Robespierres, the Reubells, the Carnots, and Talliens, and 
Dantons, and the whole tribe of regicides, robbers, and rev- 
olutionary judges, that from the rotten carcass of their own 
murdered country have poured out innumerable swarms of 
the lowest and at once the most destructive of the classes of 
animated Nature, which like columns of locusts have laid 
waste the fairest part of the world? 

Would Keppel have borne to see the ruin of the virtuous 


664 BURKE 


patricians, that happy union of the noble and the burgher, 
who with signal prudence and integrity had long governed 
the cities of the confederate republic, the cherishing fathers 
of their country, who, denying commerce to themselves, 
made it flourish in a manner unexampled under their protec- 
tion? Could Keppel have borne that a vile faction should 
totally destroy this harmonious construction, in favour of a 
robbing democracy founded on the spurious rights of man ? 

He was no great clerk, but he was perfectly well versed in 
the interests of Europe, and he could not have heard with 
patience that the country of Grotius, the cradle of the law 
of nations, and one of the richest repositories of all law, 
should be taught a new code by the ignorant flippancy of 
Thomas Paine, the presumptuous foppery of La Fayette, 
with his stolen rights of man in his hand, the wild, profligate 
intrigue and turbulency of Marat, and the impious sophistry 
of Condorcet, in his insolent addresses to the Batavian 
Republic. 

Could Keppel, who idolized the House of Nassau, who 
was himself given to England along with the blessings of 
the British and Dutch Revolutions, with Revolutions of 
stability, with Revolutions which consolidated and married 
the liberties and the interests of the two nations forever,— 
could he see the fountain of British liberty itself in servitude 
to France? Could he see with patience a Prince of Orange 
expelled, as a sort of diminutive despot, with every kind of 
contumely, from the country which that family of deliverers 
had so often rescued from slavery, and obliged to live in exile 
in another country, which owes its liberty to his house? 

Would Keppel have heard with patience that the conduct 
to be held on such occasions was to become short by the 
knees to the faction of the homicides, to entreat them quietly 
to retire? or, if the fortune of war should drive them from 
their first wicked and unprovoked invasion, that no security 
should be taken, no arrangement made, no barrier formed‘ 
no alliance entered into for the security of that which under 
a foreign name is the most precious part of England? What 


LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 665 


would he have said, if it was even proposed that the Austrian 
Netherlands (which ought to be a barrier to Holland, and the 
tie of an alliance to protect her against any species of rule 
that might be erected or even be restored in France) should 
be formed into a republic under her influence and dependent 
upon her power? 

But above all, what would he have said, if he had heard it 
made a matter of accusation against me, by his nephew, the 
Duke of Bedford, that I was the author of the war? Had I 
a mind to keep that high distinction to myself, (as from pride 
I might, but from justice I dare not,) he would have snatched 
his share of it from my hand, and held it with the grasp of a 
dying convulsion to his end. | 

It would be a most arrogant presumption in me to assume 
to myself the glory of what belongs to his Majesty, and to 
his ministers, and to his Parliament, and to the far greater 
majority of his faithful people: but had I stood alone to 
counsel, and that all were determined to be guided by my 
advice, and to follow it implicitly, then I should have been 
the sole author of a war. But it should have been a war on 
my ideas and my principles. However, let his Grace think 
as he may of my demerits with regard to the war with Regi- 
cide, he will find my guilt confined to that alone. He never 
shall, with the smallest colour of reason, accuse me of being 
the author of a peace with Regicide.—But that is high mat- 
ter, and ought not to be mixed with anything of so little 
moment as what may belong to me, or even to the Duke of 


Bedford. 


I have the honour to be, etc. 
EDMUND BURKE. 


NOTES 


1“ Tristius haud illis monstrum, nec szvior ulla 
Pestis et ira Detim Stygiis sese extulit undis. 
Virginei volucrum vultus, foedissima ventris 
Proluvies, unczeque manus, et pallida semper 
Ora fame.” 


Here the poet breaks the line, because he (and that he is Virgil) had not verse 
43 


666 BURKE 


or language to describe that monster even as he had conceived her. Had he 
lived to our time, he would have been more overpowered with the reality than 
he was with the imagination. Virgil only knew the horror of the times before 
him. Had he lived to see the revolutionists and constitutionalists of France, 
he would have had more horrid and disgusting features of his harpies to de- 
scribe, and more frequent failures in the attempt to describe them. 

2 London, J. Dodsley, 1792, 3 vols. 4to. 

8 See the history of the melancholy catastrophe of the Duke of Buckingham. 
Temp. Hen. VIII, . 

4 At si non aliam venturo fata Neroni, etc. 

5 Sir George Savile’s act, called The Nullum Tempus Act. 

6 Templum in modum arcis.”—TACITUS, of the temple of Jerusalem. 

7 There is nothing on which the leaders of the Republic one and indivisible 
value themselves more than on the chemical operations by which, through 
science, they convert the pride of aristocracy to an instrument of its own de- 
struction,—on the operations by which they reduce the magnificent ancient 
country-seats of the nobility, decorated with the feudal titles of Duke, Marquis, 
or Earl, into magazines of what they call revolutionary gunpowder. They tell 
us, that hitherto things “had not yet been properly and in a revolutionary 
manner explored.”—* The strong chateaus, those feudal fortresses, that were 
ordered to be demolished, attracted next the attention of your committee. 
Nature there had secretly regained her rights, and had produced saltpetre, 
for the purpose, as it should seem, of facilitating the execution of your decree 
by preparing the means of destruction. From these ruins, which still frown 
on the liberties of the Republic, we have extracted the means of producing 
good; and those piles which have hitherto glutted the pride of despots, and 
covered the plots of La Vendée, will soon furnish wherewithal to tame the 
traitors and to overwhelm the disaffected.” —“ The rebellious cities, also, have 
afforded a large quantity of saltpetre. Commune Affranchie” (that is, the 
noble city of Lyons, reduced in many parts to an heap of ruins) “and Toulon 
will pay a second tribute to our artillery.”—Report, ist February, 1794. 


ON WARREN HASTINGS 


[NoTE.—Burke’s opening speech on the impeachment of Warren Hastings 
occupied four days in delivery. Its great lengthand some other considerations 
prevent us from including it in this volume. But the universally admired 
peroration of that famous effort of his last years can not be ignored ; hence 
we give it here. Epiror.] 


Y LORDS, you have heard the proceedings of the 

court before which Gunga Govind Sing thought pro- 

per to appeal, in consequence of the power and protection of 

Mr. Hastings being understood to exist after he left India, 

and authenticated by his last parting deed. Your Lordships 

will judge by that last act of Mr. Hastings what the rest of 
his whole life was. 

My Lords, I do not mean now to go further than just to 
remind your Lordships of this, that Mr. Hastings’ govern- 
ment was one whole system of oppression, of robbery of in- 
dividuals, of destruction of the public, and of suppression of 
the whole system of the English government, in order to 
vest in the worst of the natives all the powers that could pos- 
sibly exists in any government,—in order to defeat the ends 
which all governments ought in common to have in view. 
Thus, my Lords, I show you at one point of view what you 
are to expect from him in all the rest. I have, I think, made 
out as clear as can be to your Lordships, so far as it was nec- 
essary to go, that his bribery and peculation was not occa- 
sional, but habitual,—that it was not urged upon him at the 
moment, but was regular and systematic. I have shown to 
your Lordships the operation of such a system on the 
revenues, 


My Lords, Mr. Hastings pleads one constant merit to 
667 


668 BURKE 


justify those acts,—namely, that they produce an increase of 
the public revenue ; and accordingly he never sells to any of 
those wicked agents any trusts whatever in the country, that 
you do not hear that it will considerably tend to the increase 
of the revenue. Your Lordships will see, when he sold to 
wicked men the province of Bahar in the same way in which 
Debi Sing had this province of Dinagepore, that consequences 
of a horrid and atrocious nature, though not to so great 
an extent, followed from it. I will just beg leave to state to 
your Lordships, that the kingdom of Bahar is annexed to 
the kingdom of Bengal ; that this kingdom was governed by 
another Provincial Council; that he turned out that Provin- 
cial Council, and sold that government to two wicked men: 
one of no fortune, at all, and the other of a very suspicious 
fortune; onea total bankrupt, the other justly excommuni- 
cated for his wickedness in his country, and then in prison 
for misdemeanours in a subordinate situation of government. 
Mr. Hastings destroyed the Council that imprisoned him ; 
and, instead of putting one of the best and most reputable 
of the natives to govern it, he takes out of prison this excom- 
municated wretch, hated by Godand man,—this bankrupt, 
this man of evil and desperate character, this mismanager 
of the public revenue inan inferior station ; and, as he had 
given Bengal to Gunga Govind Sing, he gave this province to 
Rajahs Kelleram and Cullian Sing. It was done upon this 
principle, that they would increase and very much better the 
revenue. These men seemed to be as strange instruments 
for improving a revenue as ever were chosen, I suppose, since 
the world began. Perhaps their merit was giving a bribe of 
40,0007. to Mr. Hastings. How he disposed of it I don’t 
know. He says, “ I disposed of it to the public, and it was 
in a case of emergency.”’ You will see in the course of this 
business the falsehood of that pretence ; for you will see, 
though the obligation is given for it as a round sum of 
money, that the payment was not accomplished till a year 
after; that therefore it could not answer any immediate 
exigence of the Company. Did it answer in an increase of 


ON WARREN HASTINGS 669 


the revenue? The very reverse. Those persons who had 
given this bribe of 40,000/. at the end of that year were. 
found 80,000/. in debt to the Company.. The Company 
always loses, when Mr. Hastings takes abribe ; and when he 
proposes an increase of the revenue, the Company loses often 
double. But I hope and trust your Lordships will consider 
this idea of a monstrous rise of rent, given by men of desper- 
ate fortunes and characters, to be one of the grievances in- 
stead of one of the advantages of this system. 

It has been necessary to lay these facts before you, (and I" 
have stated them to your Lordships far short of their reality, 
partly through my infirmity, and partly on account of the 
odiousness of the task of going through things that disgrace 
human nature,) that you may be enabled fully to enter into 
the dreadful consequences which attend a system of bribery 
and corruption in a Governor-General. On atransient view, 
bribery is rather a subject of disgust than horror,—the sordid 
practice of a venal, mean, and abject mind; and the effect 
of the crime seems to end with the act. It looks to be no 
more than the corrupt transfer of property from one person 
to another,—at worst a theft. But it will appear in a very 
different light, when you regard the consideration for which 
the bribe is given,—namely, that a Governor-General, claim- 
ing an arbitrary power in himself, for that consideration de- 
livers up the properties, the liberties, and the lives of an whole 
people to the arbitrary discretion of any wicked and rapacious 
person, who will be sure to make good from their blood the 
purchase he has paid for his power overthem. It is possible 
that a man may pay a bribe merely to redeem himself from 
some evil. It is bad, however, to live under a power whose 
violence has no restraint except in its avarice. But no man 
ever paida bribe for a power to charge and tax others, but 
with a view to oppress them. No man ever paid a bribe for 
the handling of the public money, but to peculate from it. 
When once such office becomes thus privately and corruptly 
venal, the very worst men will be chosen (as Mr. Hastings 
has in fact constantly chosen the very worst) ; because none 


670 BURKE 


but those who do not scruple the use of any means are 
capable, consistently with profit, to discharge at once the 
rigid demands of a severe public revenue and the private 
bribes of a rapacious chief magistrate. Not only the worst 
men will be thus chosen, but they will be restrained by no 
dread whatsoever in the execution of their worst oppressions. 
Their protection is sure. The authority that is to restrain, 
to control, to punish them is previously engaged ; he has his 
retaining fee for the support of their crimes. Mr. Hastings 
never dared, because he could not, arrest oppression in its 
course, without drying up the source of his own corrupt 
emolument. Mr. Hastings never dared, after the fact, to 
punish extortion in others, because he could not, without 
risking the discovery of bribery in himself. The same cor- 
ruption, the same oppression, and the same impunity will 
reign through all the subordinate gradations. 

A fair revenue may be collected without the aid of wicked, 
violent, and unjust instruments, But when once the line of 
just and legal demand is transgressed, such instruments are 
of absolute necessity ; and they comport themselves accord- 
ingly. When we know that men must be well paid (and 
they ought to be well paid) for the performance of honourable 
duty, can we think that men will be found to commit wicked, 
rapacious, and oppressive acts with fidelity and disinterest- 
edness for the sole emolument of dishonest employers ? 
No: they must have their full share of the prey, and the 
greater share, as they are the nearer and more necessary in- 
struments of the general extortion. We must not, therefore, 
flatter ourselves, when Mr. Hastings takes 40,000/. in bribes 
for Dinagepore and its annexed provinces, that from the 
people nothing more than 40,000/. is extorted. I speak 
within compass, four times forty must be levied on the 
people; and these violent sales, fraudulent purchases, con- 
fiscations, inhuman and unutterable tortures, imprisonment, 
irons, whips, fines, general despair, general insurrection, the 
massacre of the officers of revenue by the people, the mas- 
sacre of the people by the soldiery, and the total waste and 


ON WARREN. HASTINGS 671 


destruction of the finest provinces in India, are things of 
course,—and all a necessary consequence involved in the very 
substance of Mr. Hastings’s bribery. 

I therefore charge Mr. Hastings with having destroyed, 
for private purposes, the whole system of government by the 
six Provincial Councils, which he had no right to destroy. 

I charge him with having delegated to others that power 
which the act of Parliament had directed him to preserve 
unalienably in himself. 

I charge him with having formed a committee to be mere 
instruments and tools, at the enormous expense of 62,000/. 
per annum. 

I charge him with having appointed a person their dewan 
to whom these Englishmen were to be subservient tools,— 
whose name, to his own knowledge, was, by the general 
voice of India by the general recorded voice of the Company, 
by recorded official transactions, by everything that can 
make a man known, abhorred, and detested, stamped with 
infamy ; and with giving him the whole power which he 
had thus separated from the Council-General, and from the 
Provincial Councils. 

I charge him with taking bribes of Gunga Govind Sing. 

I charge him with not having done that bribe-service 
which fidelity even in iniquity requires at the hands of the 
worst of men. 

I charge him with having robbed those people of whom 
he took the bribes. 

I charge him with having fraudulently alienated the for- 
tunes of widows. 

I charge him with having, without right, title, or purchase, 
taken the lands of orphans, and given them to wicked persons 
under him. 

I charge him with having removed the natural guardians 
of aminor Rajah, and with having given that trust to a 
stranger, Debi Sing, whose wickedness was known to him- 
self and all the world, and by whom the Rajah, his family, 
and dependants were cruelly oppressed. 


672 BURKE 


I charge him with having committed to the management 
of Debi Sing three great provinces ; and thereby with having 
wasted the country, ruined the landed interest, cruelly 
harassed the peasants, burnt their houses, seized their 
crops, tortured and degraded their persons, and destroyed 
the honour of the whole female race of that country. 

In the name of the Commons of England, I charge all 
this villany upon Warren Hastings, in this last moment of 
my application to you. 

My Lords, what is it that we want here to a great act of 
national justice? Do we want a cause, my Lords? You 
have the cause of oppressed princes, of undone women of 
the first rank, of desolated provinces, and of wasted kingdoms. 

Do you want a criminal, my Lords? When was there so 
much iniquity ever laid to the charge of any one? No, my 
Lords, you must not look to punish any other such delin- 
quent from India. Warren Hastings has not left substance 
enough in India to nourish such another delinquent. 

My Lords, is it a prosecutor you want? You have before 
you the Commons of Great Britain as prosecutors; and I 
believe, my Lords, that the sun, in his beneficent progress 
round the world, does not behold a more glorious sight than 
that of men, separated from a remote people by the material 
bounds and barriers of Nature, united by the bond ofa social 
and moral community,—all the Commons of England resent- 
ing, as their own, the indignities and cruelties that are offered 
to all the people of India. 

Do we want a tribunal? MyLords, no example of anti- 
quity, nothing in the modern world, nothing in the range of 
human imagination, can supply us with a tribunal like this. 
My Lords, here we see virtually, in the mind’s eye, that 
sacred majesty of the crown, under whose authority you sit, 
and whose power you exercise. We see in that invisible 
authority, what we all feel in reality and life, the beneficent 
powers and protecting justice of his Majesty. We havehere 
the heir-apparent to the crown, such as the fond wishes of 
the people of England wish an heir-apparent of the crown to 


ON WARREN HASTINGS 673 


be. We have here all the branches of the royal family, in a 
situation between majesty and subjection, between the sov- 
ereign and the subject,—offering a pledge in that situation 
for the support of the rights of the crown and the liberties 
of the people, both which extremities they touch. My 
Lords, we have a great hereditary peerage here,—those who 
have their own honour, the honour of their ancestors and of 
their posterity to guard, and who will justify, as they have 
always justified, that provision in the Constitution by which 
justice is made an hereditary office. My Lords, we have 
here a new nobility, who have risen and exalted themselves 
by various merits,—by great military services which have ex- 
tended the fame of this country from the rising to the setting 
sun. We have those who, by various civil merits and vari- 
ous civil talents, have been exalted to a situation which they 
well deserve, and in which they will justify the favour of their 
sovereign, and the good opinion of their fellow-subjects, and 
make them rejoice to see those virtuous characters that were 
the other day upon a level with them now exalted above 
them in rank, but feeling with them in sympathy what they 
felt in common withthem before. Wehave persons exalted 
from the practice of the law, from the place in which they 
administered high, though subordinate, justice, to a seat 
here, to enlighten with their knowledge and to strengthen 
with their votes those principles which have distinguished 
the courts in which they have presided. 

My Lords, you have herealso the lights of our religion, you 
have the bishops of England. My Lords, you have that true 
image of the primitive Church, in its ancient form, in its 
ancient ordinances, purified from the superstitions and the 
vices which a long succession of ages will bring upon the 
best institutions. You have the representatives of that 
religion which says that their God is love, that the very vital 
spirit of their institution is charity,—a religion which so 
much hates oppression, that, when the God whom we adore 
appeared in human form, He did not appear in a form of 
greatness and majesty, but in sympathy with the lowest of 


674 BURKE 


the people, and thereby made it a firm and ruling principle 
that their welfare was the object of all government, since the 
Person who was the Master of Nature chose to appear Him- 
self in a subordinate situation. These are the considerations 
which influence them, which animate them, and will animate 
them, against all oppression,—knowing that He whois called 
first among them, and first among us all, both of the flock 
that is fed and of those who feed it, made Himself “the 
servant of all.” 

My Lords, these are the securities which we have in all the 
constituent parts of the body of this House. We know 
them, we reckon, we rest upon them, and commit safely the 
interests of India and of humanity into yourhands. There- 
fore it is with confidence, that, ordered by the Commons, 

I impeach Warren Hastings, Esquire, of high crimes and 
misdemeanours. 

I impeach him in the name of the Commons of Great 
Britain in Parliament assembled, whose Parliamentary trust 
he has betrayed. 

I impeach him in the name of all the Commons of Great 
Britain, whose national character he has dishonoured. 

I impeach him in the name of the people of India, whose 
laws, rights, and liberties he has subverted, whose properties 
he has destroyed, whose country he has laid waste and 
desolate. 

I impeach him in the name and by virtue of those eternal 
laws of justice which he has violated. 

I impeach him in the name of human nature itself, which 
he has cruelly outraged, injured, and oppressed, in both 
sexes, in every age, rank, situation, and condition of life. 


THE’*END 


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